


Next Stop Along Parnassus

by Moorishflower



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-19
Updated: 2011-04-02
Packaged: 2017-10-17 11:52:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 49,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/176587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moorishflower/pseuds/Moorishflower
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean Winchester’s life has been okay. Sure, he’s the only powerless son in a family of gods, and sure, his mother was killed when he was a toddler. There’s also the whole thing where his father might be mad, and his brother is going off to Stanford to finish his degree, and there might be a serial killer on the loose, and…</p><p>Scratch that. Dean’s life is hectic and complicated, and it’s about to get worse. The world has been rocked by the recently proven existence of angels and demons, and it just so happens that Dean’s gotten some new neighbors. Neighbors who don’t like to talk about their reasons for moving into the house across the street.</p><p>Neighbors with wings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Birth

  


Gods are real. They exist. They walk among us, and have done so forever. For as long as time has existed. Powerful, inhuman, _alien_. Zeus and Odin and Horus, Nanabozho and Sedna, Raven and Raijin, and all of their children are real: the shifters, the magic-users, the half-beings and spirits. They are real. They have always been real.

They walk among us.

~

When Dean Winchester is born, the ground beneath the hospital doesn’t quake. There are no flashes of lightning, no unearthly shrieks from the Otherbound realms, and there are most certainly no appearances from the Muses, those insufferably nosy beings, in order to foretell his greatness, or, inversely, his utter uselessness. He is not ripped from the womb of his mother and devoured by a jealous father (in fact, John and Mary are quite happy with each other, and are ever the envy of Zeus and Hera), and he isn’t born fully clothed in shining bronze armor, or with the head of an animal (unfortunately common, at the time).

Dean Winchester is a healthy, happy, cooing baby boy, and his parents have never been more terrified in their lives.

“He isn’t summoning any lightning,” John notes, and Mary gives him a _look_.

“I would hope not,” she says archly. “Lightning isn’t our style.”

“Still, he should be summoning _something_.”

“Maybe he isn’t _meant_ to summon anything. Maybe he’s one of those lesser gods. Like…oh, like Dionysus.”

“I wouldn’t call him _lesser_.”

“He’s no Thor, that’s for sure.”

Mary wearily pulls down the shoulder of her hospital gown, and then holds her firstborn to her breast. She read in some human self-help book that nursing directly after birth is one of the single greatest things a mother can do to bond with her child. She isn’t sure if it applies to supernatural creatures in precisely the same way, but she’s willing to try anything. She and John have been trying to conceive for so _long_ …Dean, at this point, is a miracle that neither of them fully understand, but nor are they going to refuse him.

“Don’t worry about him,” she says, humming softly when the tiny mouth snuffles against her breast. “Our little Dean. He’ll grow to be a fine god. You know, Raven’s child didn’t start manifesting until she hit puberty.”

“I remember that. Turned into a bird at her thirteenth birthday party.”

“Mm. Dean will be the same way, you’ll see. Not all gods have to be flashy, fire-stealing types. Sometimes they’re more subtle.”

John doesn’t say anything else, but Mary can feel him worrying. John has always been the type to worry, always been the type to be overprotective. Mary isn’t concerned. Her boy will grow up healthy and strong, and when he’s ready he’ll wow them with some feat of extraordinary strength, or maybe he’ll save a human from a burning house without the flames ever touching his skin. They just have to wait and see.

~

The old gods take their names from humans. Terpsichore is Terpsichore because the humans deemed her so, and she carries the name with a certain amount of pride.

 _We are the old gods,_ they say to themselves. _We are tradition. We have pride in ourselves as deities. We follow the ways that our mothers and fathers followed, because there has never been any other way, because we are the old gods. There is no change._

The new gods give themselves their own names, and damn the humans that they live amongst. Why should humans determine what you are called? They take their names from the annals of existence. They are the gods Eli, and Adam, and Adalwolf. They are John and Mary, and they are Jo and Ellen. They are not confined, nor are they limited by a handful of letters that humans have thrust upon them.

They are not defined by their names – they exist and are powerful in spite of them.

~

“Have you _heard_ about the new Winchester boy,” Deer-Woman says, and she strokes her fingers over the soft pelt thrown over her shoulders, and she scoffs. “Born without anything! No fur or scales, no _power_.”

“Hush, mammal,” Fence-Lizard chides. “There is a time and a place for scorn, and newborns deserve none of your ire.”

“He’s not newborn any longer. Almost a year.”

“That changes nothing.”

Deer-Woman lapses into sullen silence, perking up only when one of the new gods passes her. “Harvelle! Ellen Harvelle!”

The woman ( _goddess_ ) in question is young and blonde and beautiful. She chooses not to walk beside her husband, though they are equal in power. She is asserting her femininity. Deer-Woman does not see the point – goddesses are creatures of fertility and nurturing, and gods are destruction and creation, light and darkness, the elements. Confusing the two brings nothing but trouble.

“Yes?” Even her voice is full of strength. Deer-Woman ignores it.

“Have you heard about the Winchester boy? No _power_! Can you imagine? If I had a powerless child! I think I would just _die_ , how _awful_.”

Ellen closes her eyes; when she opens them again they are focused, somehow, like sunlight through a glass. She fixes this unerring gaze on Deer-Woman and says, “At least they _have_ a child.”

Her hand strays to her flat stomach, and Deer-Woman falls quiet again. This time, her silence is ashamed.

“Apologies, for my companion,” Fence-Lizard says softly. “She is only a mammal. Our prayers of fertility go with you.”

Ellen does not take the “mammal” comment to heart – it is not in recognition of species, when the reptile-gods use it, but rather a state of mind. Deer-Woman is gossipy and quick to judge, and she is flighty. Ellen is none of these things. In the eyes of the reptile-gods, she is closer to them than she is to any deer or ape.

“Thank you,” Ellen murmurs. She turns to leave, and Deer-Woman watches her go, her ears flicked back in muted anger.

“You shouldn’t have said anything for her,” she scolds, once Ellen Harvelle is out of earshot. “She _sympathizes_ with those…those aberrations! It isn’t natural, born to gods without _being_ a god.”

“We cannot help the circumstances of our births,” Fence-Lizard says sagely. “Do you think Dionysus wanted to be ripped from his mother’s womb? Sewn into the thigh of his father? We do not choose what we are, only who.”

“Unnatural,” Deer-Woman says again.

She, unfortunately, is the majority.

~

“Come on, Dean,” Mary croons. Her year-old son burbles at her, all flailing limbs and bright eyes, and he rolls onto his side as she watches, and then tries to push himself up with his hands. He is strong, she can see that immediately, but he’s strong for a _human_. Healthy, for a human. Unique.

For a human.

She pats her hands on the ground, and halfway around the globe there is a minor earthquake, just barely registering on the Richter scale. She isn’t thinking; she is too focused on her son.

“You can do it!” Her son finally manages to push himself up, and he rolls back onto his rump and then struggles to get his feet underneath his body. “Come to mommy! Mommy’s good boy, you can do it! Come on!”

Dean’s legs wobble as he finally manages to extend them, to use them for the first time. He stands there, and then takes one wavering step forward, and another. His tiny face lights up like a burning star.

And then he tilts, and his legs shake beneath him, and he does not even get the chance to make a noise of alarm – he topples over like a stack of bricks, splayed all over the living room floor, and Mary is proud of him for the few steps he managed to take.

Dean’s mouth trembles, and then he rolls onto his back and begins to wave his arms and legs in infant rage, lips splitting apart, wailing. Tears run down his chubby cheeks. Mary freezes, and then she swiftly scoops up her son, holding him in her arms as she rushes to the window to glance up at the sky.

There are no clouds. No rain falls down to match her son’s tears, no hurricane winds, and the sun continues to shine as it normally does. Mary carries Dean back to the living room, where she turns on the television and sits down on the sofa in order to listen. There is a news story about the Pope. There is another about rising crime rates in Detroit.

There are none about sudden rainstorms, or hurricanes, or floods. It is a balmy, sunny day in Lawrence, Kansas.

“Oh, Dean,” Mary says, and she rubs her child’s back until his sobs subside, until the only evidence that he was ever unhappy at all are the tear stains on her blouse. “It’s okay, baby, it’s okay. We’ll try again tomorrow.”

Dean gurgles against her shoulder, watching, entranced, as Mary changes the channel to local news. There’s been another murder. Not nearby, thank the skies, but all the way on the other side of the county. The news anchor says that this is the same person, the same killer. A serial killer. Mary subconsciously holds her baby tighter, causing Dean to squall with displeasure.

“Shh,” she murmurs, and loosens her grip, and strokes his back. She watches the entire story, even though it makes her feel uneasy, without John home. This is no human murderer – all the families have been of supernatural creatures. A family of fae now bereft of a mother, an orphaned ogress, and a widower telepath. All of the victims have been mothers. _All_ of them.

Mary carefully gets up from her sofa, and she goes to the front door to lock it, and then, just in case, she locks the windows, too. Just in case.

Just until John gets home.

~

When Dean turns three, Mary throws him a birthday party. He is still too young to understand why passing creatures sneer at him when she walks him in his stroller; he is still too young to understand hate or bigotry. He understands only love, something that Mary gives him in abundance, something that John was, at first, hesitant to offer…but offer it he does.

She invites everybody in the neighborhood – there are few other gods, but Fence-Lizard comes, and Ellen Harvelle and her husband, and Bobby Singer, an old friend of John’s, a _human_ friend. There are many humans in their neighborhood, and, despite Deer-Woman’s disdain, Mary invites them, too. Some of them express amazement that her house looks exactly like theirs. She has a kitchen table, they exclaim! And a refrigerator! And a garden in the backyard!

“We sort of thought that you would have altars,” one woman admits (her name is Jennifer, and she is young and pretty, and her husband carries her single girl-child with the sort of care only afforded to infant creatures and fine china). “Or…or, you know. I read in Better Homes and Gardens that Kali decorates her house with…” She swallows. “With _skulls_.”

“I am not Kali,” Mary says with a smile. “The old gods are…very fond of symbolism. I prefer windows that let the light in.”

This sets Jennifer and the other humans at ease faster than any complicated explanations as to the differences between old and new gods could have. They circle around Dean and croon nonsense at him, while Fence-Lizard and Kokopelli (who is always traveling, but who has seen fit to visit, because he knows Mary from many years ago), and John and Mary all ring around the punch bowl that they have set up. There is a cake waiting in the kitchen, Dean’s first cake, but Mary will let people see their fill for now.

“He is healthy,” Kokopelli comments. Mary inclines her head. It is a compliment; children fall ill so easily, and the fact that she has kept Dean from doing so is a testament to her strength as a goddess and her skill as a mother. “I hear songs, in his life.”

“He will sing?” Perhaps he will be a god of music. Mary would be happy, with that. But Kokopelli shakes his head.

“Not his own music. But he will make it his own.”

“Well,” John says. His disappointment is almost palpable. Mary nudges him with her shoulder. “Well, I’m sure he’ll be a smart boy. That’s what matters these days, you know. Smarts. None of this…fancy control over the elements. The world’s changing, and gods have to change with it.”

Fence-Lizard nods sagely. Mary retreats into the circle of humans to retrieve her child, ignoring the pain that she feels in John’s heart – he is a god of smoke and fire and history. He is a god of the ever-winding road. He insults himself when he says that his own powers do not matter.

Mary loves him all the more for it.

~

When Dean is four, Mary becomes pregnant again. She carries Sam Winchester for only eight days before she gives birth, and they know, immediately, that he is not like his brother. When Sam is born, he opens his mouth to scream, to awaken his lungs, and all the lights in the hospital immediately flicker and die, and dogs outside raise their voices in a single, concerted howl.

Dean sits in the waiting room with his father. The birth is difficult, as they always are, with gods, and Mary doesn’t want either of them to see her when she is so vulnerable. To such a powerful goddess, giving birth is simultaneously a joy and a shame. She will be glad when it is over.

“I’m gonna have a brother?”

“Yes,” John says softly. “And because you’re the oldest, you have to take care of him. Even if he says that he can take care of himself, you have to protect him.”

“But I’m not special.”

John frowns. “Who told you that?”

“Red-Fawn, at Miss Missy’s.”

John closes his eyes, and reins in his temper. Deer-Woman’s little girl will grow up to be a gossip and a backstabber, just like her mother. When he opens his eyes again, Dean is staring at him with an earnestness that only children can manage. “You listen here, Dean. Don’t let anyone _ever_ tell you that you aren’t special, do you hear me? _Everyone_ is special.”

Dean’s small mouth purses into a frown. “But…Red-Fawn can call _water_. She makes it come out of the ground.”

“And that’s how Red-Fawn is special. You’re special in a different way.”

“I can’t call water.”

John reaches over, hooks his hands underneath Dean’s arms and lifts him, and then settles him in his lap. He’s so small. John had always imagined that any child of his, even in infancy, would feel heavier, or larger…like they were meant for something more. But Dean is so very fragile. So tiny.

“No,” John says. “But you can take care of your brother. And you’re smart. Don’t let anyone ever tell you different, Dean. You’re smart, and that’s all you need to get ahead in the world.”

The lights overhead flicker, and, outside, a hundred stray dogs raise their voices in unison. John bounces Dean on his knee as a harried-looking doctor emerges into the waiting room. There is blood on his coat – no one looks twice. This is a hospital for the otherworldly. Blood sometimes means very little, here.

“Let’s go meet your brother,” John says, and Dean smiles.

His body might be small, John notes, but his smile could encompass the earth.

~

Three months later, there’s a fire. It’s a fire that devours the house like a living thing, and the infant Sam wails as the light and the heat assault his eyes, as he’s shoved into his brother’s arms.

“Take your brother outside,” his father says, and Dean, who can barely keep a grip on his brother, nods grimly and then rushes from the house, away from that awful heat. The fire doesn’t touch him. It _can’t_ , he knows that, because he’s holding his brother and nothing can hurt him when he’s protecting his brother. He puts his shoulder to the front door, and the hinges groan and then give way entirely – everything is weakened from the fire except for Dean. He stumbles across the grass, wincing when stones and small twigs dig into the soles of his feet. There’s a searing pain against his ankle, but he _has_ to do this, for dad, for Sammy.

Their mother is still inside, but dad will get her out.

He falls to the ground, cradling Sam against his thin chest – his brother is crying, and Dean’s ankle hurts. He cautiously reaches to touch it, and feels raw, red skin, like the time he burned himself against the stove while mom was cooking. He must have brushed against something in the house while his dad was telling him to run.

Dean touches his little brother’s cheeks, and says, “It’s okay, Sammy. It’s okay,” the way he’s heard his mother do it. Slowly, Sam’s shrieks quiet. Thunder rumbles sullenly overhead, and a few drops of rain spatter down again Dean’s back. They subside quickly. The fire rages behind them.

He looks up, up at the house, at the window that once peeked into Sam’s nursery and now looks in at ash and embers.

There’s the figure of a man, standing there, and at first Dean thinks it’s dad, because the only other person in the house is their mother. But the flames surge, illuminating the blurry silhouette, and Dean realizes that it isn’t his father. It isn’t someone he even knows.

It’s a man, looking down at them. Dean isn’t sure, but he thinks…

He thinks the man might have yellow eyes. But maybe it’s just the fire.

“It’s okay,” Dean says again. Even though he knows it isn’t. He knows this because, as he watches the flames leap higher, the bright orange glow of them flickers, then darkens to black, and the man in the window smiles and then fades away into the shadows.


	2. Change

 

 _”…The Maenad rights movement continues to cause controversy, we’re here in New York City with the leader of the New York chapter of the Holy Church of Dionysus, High Priestess Scylla Dupont. Ms. Dupont, how do you respond to allegations that your religion is based in sex and alcohol, not faith?”_

_“I believe that, in a world where gods ride the subway next to ordinary humans, ‘faith’ is a rather outdated term. We used to believe in these gods, and we called it ‘faith’, but what do we call it now that we know they are there? Belief based on faith is no longer necessary. So, I respond by saying that we do not require it in order to worship our god. Dionysus himself comes to our Church on the third Tuesday of every month. What more proof do we need?”_

“Fucking clever,” Dean says. “She never even answered the question.”

“Everyone knows what goes on in the Church of Dionysus,” Sam adds. He reaches over Dean in order to grab the remote, and he fumbles until he manages to change the channel to some movie on Lifetime. “Guy’s crazy.”

“Don’t,” Dean says, and Sam shrugs. The subject of mad gods is a sore one, between them, ever since their father left, and Dean and Sam made the choice to stay behind.

“Seems like there are a lot of rights movements, lately,” Sam comments. “I mean, first the merfolk wanted to have libraries with waterway access, and then that whole thing with the demons revealing themselves…”

“Don’t even talk about demons, dude.”

“They’re not _all_ bad.”

“They’re _demons_. And you know as well as I do what they’re capable of.”

But Sam doesn’t remember the flames, darkening into burnt-flesh black, and he doesn’t remember their father’s agonized scream when he had found his wife’s dead body. When he had found the demon that killed her.

When the demon had gotten away.

“If you ask me, this whole demons and angels thing is bad news,” Dean says, and he grabs the remote away from Sam. His little brother is sprawled out on the couch next to him – the sound of traffic drones outside, and it’s humid, as it always is in Pennsylvania in the summer.

Dean hadn’t chosen Pennsylvania for any particular reason. It had just been where he happened to be when he’d decided that enough was enough, and he just…hadn’t gotten around to leaving yet. “I mean…where the fuck is their god? This Yahweh guy. Or Jehovah, or whatever the fuck his name is. You’d think he’d show up and give his followers flak for all the trouble they’re causing.”

“Angels haven’t caused any trouble,” Sam reminds him. “I’ve never even _seen_ one. They always send human representatives when there are news stories about them.”

Dean snorts. “If demons cause trouble, and demons and angels come from the same god, then it stands to reason that angels will cause trouble, too. Simple logic.”

“Yeah, on _Mars_ , maybe.”

Dean punches Sam in the shoulder, laughing, but he doesn’t try to drag the discussion ( _argument_ ) out any further. He’s never seen an angel, either. But he thinks he wouldn’t like it, if he did. Demons are bad enough on their own; he doesn’t need some holy chicken-man making things more complicated. “Shut up and get me a beer.”

“The kitchen is like, fifteen feet away!”

“Yeah, but I want a _cold_ beer.”

Sam sighs extravagantly, and then absently waves his hand over the table that they’re both resting their feet on (“Fuck decorum,” Dean had said). The air beneath his hand shivers, like heat waves but more substantial, and then the ripples of power slowly form themselves into the shape of a bottle. Dean waits until the final details of the label have resolved themselves, and Sam pulls his hand back, before reaching out and grabbing it.

“ _Sweet_ ,” he says. “Wish there weren’t restrictions on this sort of thing.”

“You saw what happened when that guy Jeff summoned a dragon in the middle of Times Square. The manifestation laws are there for a reason.”

Dean cracks the bottle open and then takes a sip. Cold. Like he asked for. “I’m not talking about dragons, dude, just beer. Or…I dunno, sandwiches.”

“Exceptions never work. Someone would get the idea to just put a dragon between two slices of bread, and they’d call _that_ a sandwich. Or they’d fill a bottle of beer with scorpions. See what I mean?”

“Gods with grudges, dude,” Dean muses. “Doesn’t make sense. Why get all hung up on things when you’re immortal, anyways? Just wait a while and the problem solves itself.”

“Because we’re closer to humans than the old gods ever were,” Sam says quietly. “We’re all like Dionysus, now. Half-blooded, or half-minded. We don’t think like gods used to.”

Dean squints. “I also would have accepted ‘Yeah, Dean,’ or just you magicking me up a sandwich.”

Sam laughs. “ _Lazy_. Go make your own sandwich, I’ve got to answer my email.”

“Regular email or worshippers?”

Sam makes a face. “Worshippers. I’m just glad I haven’t really put myself out there. I can only imagine how much junk mail celebrities like Zeus get. Still, twenty or thirty emails a day aren’t bad…and some of them…”

Sam trails off, and then glances down at his feet. He stares at them for a moment, then turns on his heel and vanishes into his small bedroom. Dean assumes that by “some of them” Sam actually means “ _one_ of them” – he wonders who the person is, whether they’re male or female, whether they’ve started sending Sam dirty pictures yet. When it had become apparent that their father was no longer interested in taking care of them, but only finding their mother’s killer, Dean had taken out some books from the library in the town they’d been staying in (and had conveniently forgotten to return them before they left), reading up on how to raise a teenage god. One of the largest chapters had dealt with how to help a god through their “age of majority”, which Dean, at seventeen, hadn’t understood, and hadn’t really cared about. He’d been more concerned with how to stop his little brother from breaking every window within a three-block radius every time he had a wet dream or a nightmare.

It wasn’t until later that Dean learned what “age of majority” meant, for gods. It wasn’t the age at which they could vote, or drink, or smoke, but the age at which they were considered _worshipable_. As soon as Sam had turned eighteen, _bam_ \- Dean’s phone had been flooded with messages begging for the help of the holy Son of Winchester, letters had started pouring in by the dozens, and Dean…

 _Dean wonders if any of those people know that _he_ is the eldest son, not Sam._

“Anything new?” he calls out, sipping his beer and keeping his eyes trained on the television. It isn’t worth getting bitter about…and besides, it’s not the sort of thing he wants for himself, anyways. He’s all for people telling him how handsome he is, but dozens of them? At the same time? _Every day_? And not just that, but _asking_ him for stuff. And, judging by the expressions Sam sometimes gets while he’s reading his email, people aren’t just asking for rainbows and kittens.

No, better to be normal. Even if it makes him the odd one in their neighborhood. Even if it means that he’ll never really understand what it is that Sam’s going through.

“Same old,” Sam calls back, and as he reenters the living room he stretches, all gangly limbs and floppy hair. Even at twenty-two, he looks more like an overgrown puppy than a dude. “People are starting to say that dad referred them to me, though.”

“Figures,” Dean mutters. “Unless they’re offering to pay our rent, don’t give ‘em shit. We don’t owe dad anything.” It pains him, to say that. He had always been the odd son ( _the disappointment_ ), but there’s still a part of him that desperately wants his father back, wants his dad to show up on their doorstep one day and tell him that it’s all gonna be okay. That he’s done a good job.

“You’re just saying that,” Sam says. He had been angrier with their father, growing up, than Dean had. He had raged against being dragged across the country, searching for a demon that he wasn’t even sure truly existed. Their father had been the only one to see it, after all.

And these days, they’re both uncomfortably aware of the prevalence of mad gods.

Dean decides to change the subject. “What about classes? How are those going?”

Online classes, for the most part – Sam had applied to dozens of universities, most of them on a whim, and he had gotten into Stanford with an offer of a full ride. The catch, of course, had been that he would have had to move out to California in the first place.

They’ve been talking about it, a little. About Sam going there to finish his last two years. Sam is keen on it.

Dean…not so much. The apartment will feel desperately small, without his little brother taking up half the space.

“They’re okay. They’re…I’m taking a few political sciences classes. Not any of the ones that I need, but…electives.”

“You’re really set on being a lawyer?”

“I think I could help people. Not just…people like me, but…”

“You can say it,” Dean mutters. “Humans. Like me.”

“Dean…”

“It’s a good goal.” Dean pushes himself up from the couch, then goes to deposit his empty beer in the kitchen. Sam’s been on a recycling kick – Dean drops the bottle into the container underneath the sink, the one marked “glass”, and says, “You’re planning on going, then?”

He can’t see Sam’s face, but he can picture his expression, sort of sad and sheepish, biting his lip. “Stanford has one of the best pre-law programs in the country. And I can’t just…take online classes for the rest of my life. If I want to do this, I have to…”

“Yeah, I get it.” Dean rests his hands on the edge of the sink, leaning over the white porcelain. He stares down into the basin; he needs to do the dishes, before they start fermenting or something. “Are you going to stay there?”

There’s the sound of movement, and then Sam’s shadow falls over him, a heavy presence at his back. Dean doesn’t turn around to look.

“It would be…easier, if I got a place in Palo Alto,” Sam says, cautiously. “ I mean, I could commute, but…”

“But your gig is creation, not transport,” Dean finishes. It’s a conversation they’ve hashed out before, when Sam had first discovered that teleportation (or whatever the fuck it is that gods call it) was within his range of abilities, and had consequently started trying to ‘port himself _everywhere_. He’d ended up somewhere in rural China before they had figured out what was going on, and it had been one of the few times in their childhood that Dean could remember their father taking an interest in _Sam_ , and not just what Sam represented: a dead wife, a rebellious younger son, and a firstborn that was…well. Less than god-like. _Human_.

“You know how much it drains me. I have to rest for two hours if I go as far as the next town over…going back and forth between California and Penn’s Creek would just be…”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “You’d be unconscious half the time and too tired to function the rest. I get it.”

“Do you? Really?”

Dean clenches his fists around the lip of the sink; his knuckles turn white, bloodless. He consciously forces himself to relax as Sam takes a step closer, ducking his head in order to actually _look_ at Dean. “Yeah, Sammy. I do.”

“Because I don’t _have_ to go…”

“That’s bullshit, and you know it. College was all you talked about, back when we were still with dad.” How much he had hated moving around, how he’d wanted to _do_ something with his life, instead of hunting down rogue monsters and demons. “And now you have the chance, and I’m not gonna let you hold yourself back for _my_ sake. I promised dad I’d take care of you, and if that means letting you run off to California, then that’s what’ll happen.”

“You really mean that?”

Dean turns around, trying on a smile. Sam stares earnestly at him. His smile feels forced, but not so much that he thinks it looks faked. Sam doesn’t seem to buy it, but he tentatively smiles back.

“Of course I mean it. You’re not gonna get the job you want in this bumfuck town, are you?”

“What about you?”

Dean waves off Sam’s concern, making a soft, derisive noise. “I’m fine. _Really_. Everything I need is here. There’s a liquor store down the street, and there’s always construction going on…I’m set for life, Sam.”

“Dean – ”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Dean interrupts. “Don’t tell me that I’m…missing out on something bigger. I don’t care, Sam. Let there be bigger things. They aren’t meant for me.”

“You’re wrong,” Sam says. “Everyone’s meant for better things. That’s part of being alive.”

“Yeah, well.” Dean brushes past Sam on his way back to the living room. There’s going to be a special on manticores on the Discovery Channel in like, fifteen minutes, and he doesn’t want to miss it. He watched his father kill a manticore, once. There are so few places for the wild things to live, now. When they wander into towns, or worse, _cities_ , someone has to deal with them. Someone has to make sure they don’t harm any humans. “I’m hardly ‘everyone’.”

“You always do that.”

“What?”

“Put yourself down.”

“You’re crazy,” Dean announces, but to no one in particular. He half-covers his smile with the back of his hand, and then drops heavily down onto their ancient couch, pretending to muffle a cough. “You’re fucking nuts. California is just the place for you. Bunch of loonies.”

“Careful, your prejudice is showing.”

Sam kicks the side of the couch, and Dean feels it reverberate through his bones, like Sam is a hammer and Dean is a gong. He doesn’t mention it; Sam doesn’t know his own strength, sometimes. “Whatever. Hippie.”

“Jerk.”

“ _Bitch_.”

Sam grins at him, and Dean, cautiously, grins back.

“So, moving on to a more important topic…how many nude pictures did people email you today?” Dean asks, and Sam groans extravagantly.

~

Dean works construction. It isn’t a glamorous job, and it doesn’t allow for a lot of ascension (via the corporate ladder, of course), but it’s regular work, and the pay is decent. It keeps him in skin mags and beer, and the occasional fancy dinner when Sam aces an exam or something, so Dean can’t ask for anything more.

They - he should stop saying that, considering Sam’s plans, but old habits die hard - live in a neighborhood that’s predominantly otherbeings (it’s been about thirteen years since _Lippa Freyrson et al. versus Benjamin Kent_ , and “being” is now considered the socially acceptable term for all creatures, with the prefix “other” used specifically to denote the supernatural), so there’s always plenty to do. There’s a family of garudas a few miles south who are expecting hatchlings soon, and they need expansions built into their rookery. There’s a business geared towards centaurs and satyrs in Scotrun that wants their office building outfitted with special dining stalls for their clients. There’s a goddess in Allentown who’s looking to build her first temple. There’s never any shortage of work, and Dean does some carpentry on the side – between the two, he’s comfortable, and he’s been able to give Sam new clothes when his old ones wear out, and food, and a roof over his head.

The point is, Dean isn’t poor. He doesn’t need charity, and he works hard, is _capable_ of working hard, and he doesn’t need some strutting being to come and tell him how to do his job better when he…

When he’s human. And everyone around him is…other.

“Just let Ted handle it,” Rufus says. Dean grunts something that might be a negative, or might just be a sound of intense exertion, and then lets the heavy steel I-beam drop from his shoulder to the ground. He wipes sweat from his forehead and scowls.

“Tell me again why we don’t just have a crane to haul this shit around?”

“Because we have _Ted_.” Rufus gestures towards the minotaur in question; Ted is sitting in the shade of a large hickory tree, his hooves crossed demurely over each other, eating a sandwich. If Dean had to hazard a guess, he would say it’s probably peanut butter. Minotaurs, unlike their more (or less, depending on how you looked at it) humanoid cousins, the satyrs, are incapable of eating meat. “Let it go, Winchester. You can’t do everything yourself.”

“I can try.”

“Now you’re just being an idiot. Go take your lunch break, I’ll have Ted move this I-beam.” The _for you_ isn’t said, but it’s implied, and Dean scowls, but has no choice in the matter. He retrieves his lunch from the small “break area” that Rufus has set up a few dozen feet away from the site itself, and then he joins Ted underneath the shade of the hickory tree. He smells like grass and Head  & Shoulders “Citrus Breeze” shampoo. Dean imagines all that fur is a hassle to keep presentable.

“I wish the bakery here made wheatgrass bread,” Ted says. He is what a slow flood would sound like, if it had a voice. “This white bread just doesn’t taste right.”

“Have you tried whole wheat?” Dean asks; that’s the type of bread that Sam makes _him_ buy, because Sam is a giant freaking girl. But Ted just shakes his huge, shaggy head. His eyes, when he turns to look at Dean, are like two pieces of jet set in a huge, curved wall of brown felt.

“It just isn’t the same,” he says. He sounds sad. Dean cautiously pats Ted’s shoulder (broad, and slightly hirsute, but otherwise human). “Maybe I will start bringing granola instead.”

“I hear that’s good for you,” Dean offers. It sounds like something that Sam would tell him, so he assumes it’s true. Ted blinks at him, and then stuffs the remainder of his peanut butter sandwich into his mouth, chewing ponderously as he heaves himself to his hooves and then trots over to the fallen I-beam. He lifts it onto his huge shoulders without any problems at all.

Dean takes out his own lunch, a plastic-wrapped roast beef sandwich from the New York deli down the street. He peels back the cellophane and sullenly starts to eat, watching the other workers (Ted is the only minotaur, but they’ve also got two ogres, a kelpie, and a Stonecutter Clan dwarf) readily, _easily_ , assemble the framework for the office building they’ve been hired to construct.

 _Rufus is human,_ he thinks. Rufus should be able to understand what this feels like, sitting on the sidelines and only being able to _watch_ while someone else does your job for you.

One of the other humans on the team drops heavily down next to Dean – Ash, probably the only guy he works with that he could call a friend – and he rubs his dusty fingers over the back of his neck. His mullet is pulled into a tight ponytail. “Skies above, it’s _hot_.”

“That’s summer in Pennsylvania for you,” Dean says dryly. Ash reaches into his pocket and pulls out a squashed-looking _something_ wrapped in foil. He sees Dean looking, and holds the thing up with a smile.

“Chicken potpie,” he announces. Sure enough, when he peels the foil back, it’s a fucking chicken potpie, steaming in the midafternoon heat. Dean wrinkles his nose at it.

“Dude, it’s like a hundred degrees.”

“Nothing will keep me from my chicken potpie,” Ash says. He holds it using the foil, and eats it the way Dean would eat a particularly large, juicy burger. When he talks, he seems to forget that he’s eating, too – he sprays crumbs across the ground, and Dean leans back in self-defense.

“Did you hear about the murders?” Ash asks. Dean lifts one shoulder in cautious interest. _Murders_. The last thing he needs in his life is more death. He isn’t even sure if his _father_ is alive on a day-to-day basis, he doesn’t want to be wondering about his neighbors, too. Ash plows on, unconcerned with Dean’s hesitance. “They’re saying it’s a serial killer. It started in Kansas, and then moved to Idaho, and like…some other Midwest states. Now it’s in New York. It’ll be in Pennsylvania before you know it, man.”

“What do the police say?” He’s morbidly curious, but Ash only chews his chicken potpie, and then shrugs.

“They’re in the dark,” he says. “They got a couple of those…what do you call them? The people who can read the memories of things?”

“Psychometry,” Dean says. “It’s not really reading memories.”

Ash waves his hand, the one not holding the chicken potpie. “Whatever. They’ve got a couple of those guys, and they’re saying all the stories match up. It’s one person.”

“Shit.” Dean stares out over the construction site. “Is…is it a human?”

“They don’t know. I mean, I’m assuming not. That’s a lot of ground to cover.”

“Yeah,” Dean murmurs. “I guess it is.” He tries to think of things that are powerful enough, or specialized enough, to get from Kansas, to Idaho, to New York, all within the course of a few weeks. Gods of travel. Hermes. And…he can’t think of any others. He’s so bad at remembering the new gods. The only one he’s ever cared about has been Sam. Maybe it’s a creature? Or…

“Is it a demon? Do you think?”

Ash stares at him, and Dean feels the urge to rush out an explanation. He squashes it, viciously. “I’ve heard a lot about demons causing trouble. Hurting people.” _Burning houses and pinning mothers to ceilings and killing them. Ruining families. Creatures with no hearts and yellow eyes. Demons are to blame, they’re evil and home-destroyers and wrong._

“I haven’t heard anything about that,” Ash says cautiously. “I mean, it’s probably just some psycho. They’ll catch him.”

“Or it,” Dean adds, because he isn’t sure if demons even have genders. They take the bodies of the brain-dead, don’t they? Angels do, too. The brain-dead or the willingly possessed. Dean can’t imagine that, can’t imagine being trapped inside his own body while something that’s trying to look human but _isn’t_ rides him around like a fucking bicycle. Would it be like being trapped in a small room with a hurricane, he wonders? Or with a snarling animal, something so alien it hasn’t even been named yet? The thought terrifies him.

He looks at Ash, and doesn’t admit to it.

A loud _bang_ attracts their attention; Dean immediately pushes himself to his feet as Rufus jogs past them, shouting. The kelpie and Lona Stonecutter are fighting, flat-out _brawling_. The kelpie (Dean’s never learned his name) spits out something in Gaelic and then punches Lona in the face. He recoils, shaking his fist – Dean imagines it’s probably a lot like punching a brick wall.

“Say it to my face, bottomfeeder! Fucking siltsucker! What’d you say about my brother?!” Lona shouts, and then follows up with a headbutt to the kelpie’s midsection. He doubles over, and Lona clambers up onto his shoulders and then starts enthusiastically punching him in the head.

“That’s _enough_!” Rufus shouts, and makes a sharp gesture towards Stellan and Steven (the ogres; twins, Dean had learned, which is apparently rare) even as he seems wary of getting closer.

Dean watches Stellan approach the two otherbeings, and Lona squawks when one massive, stony hand curls itself in her shirt and lifts her into the air. Steven deals with the kelpie, holding him in what looks like a particularly painful headlock.

“Fucking fey, man,” Ash says. He says it so casually – Dean is always amazed at how easily people can compartmentalize the different otherbeings. The fey are smart and they make good businessmen, but they’re also tricky, and excellent liars. Ogres are strong, but stupid. Dwarves are born craftsmen, but they’re prideful and too invested in their clans. Gods…

Gods are gods. They’re powerful and unpredictable and high profile. They’re the celebrities of the world of the other. They should never be trusted, because gods don’t see people as _people_ , they see them as kindling, because what is a god without believers? Their followers are burned up and then thrown away, like charcoal. Like the plastic wrappers off energy bars.

The otherbeings are guilty of this, too. But humans are the ones who seem to push it the hardest, and Dean finds it hard to listen to, because he knows so much of it isn’t true.

“It’s not all the fey,” he tries to say. “It’s just this guy, he’s…he’s being an asshole. Not all of them are like that.”

Ash looks at him. “Dude,” he says. “Chill.”

But Dean _is_ chill. He’s fine. He isn’t angry or even upset, really. He just thinks it’s stupid, basing your entire opinion off of stuff that _humans_ have told you. Humans don’t understand the other. They never have.

Dean is in that most unlucky position: stuck right in the middle, but never quite managing to fit there.

~

Sam calls him about a week before his planned move out to California.

“Dean,” he says, voice urgent. Dean immediately feels his pulse begin to race. _Please,_ he thinks, _Oh please, don’t let this be the black-tipped flames lunging towards the sky, please let this be worshippers who’ve found our address, or those Jehovah-followers trying to get us to take their little books. Please let it be Sam pissed off that I left a towel on the floor. Anything but the flames._

“What, Sammy?”

“You have _got_ to see this insanity. Is it your lunch break yet? Or can you leave early? _Please_ tell me you can just leave early, this is the craziest thing.”

He doesn’t sound like he’s in danger. Dean can’t hear the crackle of burning flesh or the rush of otherworldly flames. He feels his heart rate slow down, some of the panic easing from him, like slipping out of a pool. “Sun’s sake, Sammy, what the fuck is going on?”

“I can’t even…it’s _crazy_.”

Dean covers his eyes with his free palm. “You keep _saying_ that. Is Shauna White’s cat stuck in a tree again?” He uses the term “cat” only because that’s what Shauna herself calls it. The first time Dean had seen the thing, he’d nearly pissed himself – it wasn’t often you saw a fully-grown griffin, wings clipped, caught in a tree. It had taken a call to the local department of animal control, and three tranquilizer darts, before the thing could be carried down.

Dean can imagine Sam running his hand back through his hair, messing it up. “No, it’s…We have new neighbors.”

“Unless they’re transmuting rocks into gold in their front yard, _I don’t care_.”

“Dean, just _come home_. You have to see this.”

And then Sam hangs up.

“Fuck,” Dean says, and then pockets his cell phone. What is going _on_? Dean rubs his hand over the back of his neck and scowls at nothing in particular. If he leaves early, that’s a few hours of no money that he can’t get back. But his lunch break is only a half-hour, and it takes ten minutes to drive from the site to the apartment…And what if Sam actually _does_ need him? What if he’s in trouble, but he just doesn’t want to mention it? He’s that type, the type who doesn’t want to worry people. Dean closes his eyes and breathes out.

“Rufus,” he shouts, and opens his eyes when he hears an answering _Hm_. “I’m clocking out early!”

“Trouble?” Rufus appears at his shoulder; he probably wasn’t all that far away to begin with. Dean shrugs.

“Sam,” he says, and Rufus nods sagely. Like the fact that Sam’s a god excuses everything. Dean struggles to explain. “I mean...He didn’t sound like he was in trouble.”

“But he’s young,” Rufus offers. “Still got that spark in him. You go on home, Dean. Make sure your brother hasn’t done something he’ll regret.”

Dean resents that, the idea that because Sam is a deity he’ll end up…Dean doesn’t know. Going crazy and summoning a dragon in Times Square, maybe. But it’s what most humans think – gods aren’t to be trusted. Gods are too powerful to be anything but trouble.

So Dean takes what he can get, and he clocks out while Rufus watches, and Ash stands off in the distance, squinting up at the sun. “Nice day,” Ash says. “Still hot, though. Did you hear about Temple University?”

Dean hasn’t heard about Temple University. He isn’t sure he wants to.

He leaves, before Ash has the chance to tell him.

~

Dean drives back to the apartment. He always has trouble explaining the apartment to people – it’s one of those converted houses, with the incongruously small bathrooms and the oddly-placed walls, like someone took a much larger room and then partitioned it off. That’s probably _exactly_ what happened, actually. But, he always has trouble explaining it, because it’s the only converted house in the middle of an ordinary, suburban residential area. Everything around them is swing sets on lawns and backyard pools, and he and Sam and a handful of other people are sort of stuck uncomfortably in the middle, unable to hold their own family barbecues or football parties.

Dean doesn’t mind, but he knows that it bothers Sam, on occasion. Sam has always wanted a proper home, a place where he can put roots down. The whole white picket fence thing.

Dean wants some stability, too, but he’s willing to take what he can get.

When he pulls into the tiny parking lot in front of the apartment, the first thing he notices is that all of his neighbors are out in force. There’s Andy Gallagher, the landlord and resident psychic (falling under that broad umbrella of “powers that don’t have technical names yet”), and Becky Rosen, the only human in the complex besides Dean, standing next to her boyfriend, Chuck. Dean isn’t sure if Chuck is a god or some kind of Trickster, or maybe he’s just some guy who happens to be able to _make_ stuff – whatever he is, he’s a decent person. Dean’s shared a beer or two with him before. Lenore, the vampire who lives next door to Andy, is probably holed up inside, waiting for someone to bring news back to her. Having to avoid the sun must suck, Dean thinks.

And, of course, there’s Sam. Sam, staring determinedly across the street at a handful of moving vans, with his stupid hair flopped over his eyes. Dean climbs out of his truck, and makes his way straight for his brother.

“You need to cut your damn hair,” he says, and reaches up to make a passing swipe at the back of Sam’s head. His brother hunches his shoulders and swats ineffectually at Dean’s arm.

“Shut up,” he mutters. “ _Look_.”

Dean squints across the street. “You had me clock out early, depriving us of money that we could buy food and textbooks with, just so you could show me our new neighbors moving their junk around?”

“I’ll buy my own textbooks,” Sam says, waving his hand. “And I already know a place, I’ll pay for it all. But dude, they aren’t just _neighbors_.”

Dean watches as two guys stroll around the moving van, carefully surveying the half-orcs who are hauling out their furniture, boxes of thing, carefully labeled. Dean can’t make out any of the words. The two guys, though, they’re easy to see. One of them is taller, though not as tall as Dean, and he has short, dark hair. He’s wearing a tan trench coat, seemingly to spite the summer heat, and beneath that Dean can make out what looks like a dress shirt, a tie, nice slacks. A businessman? His friend, though (or his brother, or maybe his partner, Dean can never tell, these days), is shorter, has longer hair roughly the same color as sun-scorched wheat. He has a wide, easy smile. When he laughs, Dean can hear it clear across the street.

“They look like regular neighbors to me,” Dean says flatly. Good neighbors, though. He watches the shorter guy spring up into the moving van, and then come out carrying two smaller boxes, one under each arm. His sleeves are rolled up – his arms are lean and pale. The other one has yet to take off his coat. He’s got to be _roasting_ in that thing…maybe he’s from Arizona, or someplace like that. Some state where it’s hot all the time, and Pennsylvania humidity might be mistaken by him for a mild chill.

 _“Dean,” Sam says. “They’re _angels_.”_

Dean blinks. He cranes his neck, trying to get a closer look – it’s impossible, they’re all the way across the street, and even as he watches the two guys disappear into the house along with their half-orc movers. But Sam can’t be right. Angels? Buying a house? Helping to move in?

“Bullshit.”

“Cross my heart,” Sam says, and lays his palm over his chest. “Tell him, Andy.”

Their landlord blinks, as if clearing sleep from his eyes. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, they are. I talked to Murray, he’s one of the movers…He says they’re…one of them is an _archangel_.”

Dean snorts. “What, like an angel plus one?”

“Something like that.”

Sam rests his other hand on Dean’s shoulder, slowly, gently drawing him aside. Dean goes, but only because it doesn’t seem like Andy has anything more to say, and everyone else is just standing around, gaping. Even Chuck has his customary notepad held loosely at his side; he doesn’t look like he’s going to start writing in it anytime soon.

“This is awesome,” Sam says. Excited energy crackles around him. _Literally_. Dean leans warily back until Sam takes a deep breath and gets a hold of himself. “Seriously, _awesome_. I mean, they’re…ordinary. They look…”

“Human,” Dean says. Sam sort of flinches away, as if he’s afraid of offending his brother. “Probably ‘cause they _wear_ people, Sam. Like cheap suits.”

“They take vessels, but…”

“But what, Sam? They aren’t like demons because they need _consent_? Bullshit, you and I both know that people can be convinced to give up almost _anything_ if there’s something in it for them.”

Sam looks uneasy. He peers over Dean’s shoulder, at the house across the street – it’s a small house, probably only meant to contain two, maybe three people. A small family. And now it’s being occupied by angels. An angel and possibly an _arch_ angel, according to Murray the half-orc.

“I don’t think they’re like that,” he says. “I mean, all the stuff I’ve read about them…”

“You shouldn’t believe everything you read.”

“You’re just scared of things _changing_ , Dean! Just…let it go, okay? You should go over and talk to them. Get to know them. I’ll bet they’re really nice.”

Dean doesn’t answer. He doesn’t want to “get to know them”. He doesn’t want to find out if they’re nice, or arrogant, or dumb as sacks of rocks. He wants Sam to stay, here, in hot and humid Pennsylvania with him. He wants to keep his small family together.

But, at the same time, he knows he can’t. Because family leaves. Family always leaves. That’s just how it is. And…he wants Sam to be happy. If that means going to Stanford and finding some hot goddess to settle down with, having one-point-five kids with a white picket fence and an adopted dog…then so be it.

Even if it also means Dean will be alone.

“Yeah,” he says, looking at Sam, at Sam’s stupid too-long hair and his earnest eyes, his open expression. He’s so different from Dean. He was never called “bad-blood” or “mongrel” growing up. He’s the _normal_ one, and Dean loves him so, so much. He wants Sam to _do_ something with his life, however long he chooses to live it. Something great. “Yeah, okay.”

Sam beams at him, and even if Dean thinks he’ll hate the stretch of absence between them, he thinks he realizes, now, that it’s necessary.

~

Sam leaves a few days early.

Not because he wants to, but because he decides that he _has_ to. The Fall semester starts in a few weeks, and he wants to be able to get himself set up as soon as possible. Add to that how much the move is going to drain him of strength, for at _least_ twenty-four hours, and Dean can’t complain about his decision. He helps Sam carry all of his things out to the parking lot, draws lines of white chalk between them. Dean doesn’t fully understand the magic of gods, but he can imitate an understanding of it. Well enough, at least, to help his brother get everything he needs to California.

“All packed?”

“Yes, Dean.”

“You’ve got all your textbooks? Your schedule?”

“Everything’s in my duffel.”

“Got extra underwear?”

“ _Dean_.”

He can’t help it – he laughs, and then pulls Sam into a hug that could crack ribs. Sam radiates power and nervousness, an odd combination. He’s never traveled so far on purpose, before.

“You know you can come home,” Dean murmurs into his brother’s shoulder. “Any time you want to. _Any time_. I’ll always let you in.”

Sam’s grip around his shoulders tightens, and he snuffles into Dean’s hair. Is he crying? “Thanks, Dean. That means a lot.”

Dean can’t think of a witty comeback. He pushes Sam away, swiping at his eyes. “Pollen,” he explains. It’s summer, and the trees are all in full bloom. It’s a perfectly valid explanation, and Sam doesn’t question it.

“Allergies suck,” Sam agrees. Neither of them gets allergies, but they pretend, just for now, that they do. “So…you ready to do this?”

“Ready as you are.”

Sam only asks out of politeness. Dean has already done his part, has already laid down the white lines of power, and now all there is left for him to do is to stand back and watch Sam work his magic. He takes a step away from the huge pile of luggage Sam has amassed; he doesn’t say goodbye. Instead he watches, rapt, as Sam closes his eyes and kneels down, laying his hand on the edge of one line of chalk. It comes alive beneath his palm, first sparking, and then glowing like phosphorous creatures in the darkness, except it’s broad daylight, and this is Dean’s brother, not some night-blooming insect. The chalk doesn’t move, but some part of Dean’s vision tries to perceive it as doing so – it wriggles like a trapped snake against the black tar parking lot. Dean closes his eyes and then re-opens them, but it doesn’t help. It’s like staring for too long at the sun.

He looks, instead, at Sam, brows furrowed in concentration, hair swept back and tucked neatly behind his ears. It’s long enough that he can do that, now – he can probably put it in a ponytail, if he wants. His skin ripples like an electric current through water. He is powerful and fierce, and he is Dean’s brother. A surge of pride washes through him, so strong he nearly feels the need to sink down onto the ground and rest, but he doesn’t. He stands there, watching, until Sam looks up at him, eyes half-lidded and already weary.

Dean pretends that Sam doesn’t mouth “goodbye” as he, and then the luggage surrounding him, slowly fades from sight, leaving behind nothing, not even dusty lines of chalk. Dean is standing in an empty parking lot with his hands stuffed into his pockets, staring at something that is no longer there. He blinks, and has to remind himself that yes, he has a brother. No, this isn’t a dream. Sam was there, and now he isn’t.

Having a brother who’s a god is difficult, sometimes.

Dean scuffs the ground with the toe of his boot (picturing the chalk smearing bone-white across the dark leather), and then he glances around, wondering if anyone else was here to see Sam off. Did he tell anyone else? Or has he left this old life entirely behind, ready to build something new out in California?

Across the street, one of the angels is watching. At first, Dean doesn’t recognize him – he sees some vast imprint of light and force, scorching the sky, his eyes still dazzled by godly power. The wriggling lines of chalk come back to him, and he takes his hand from his pocket and presses the heel of his palm against his eyes. Spots blur across his vision. When he looks again, the angel is like he was when Dean saw them moving in: it’s the shorter one, with the longer hair and the laughing mouth. Dean likes mouths like that. Likes faces that express themselves in eyes and lips and teeth, rather than words.

He’s watching Dean. Dean isn’t sure if he saw the whole thing, if he saw Sam’s departure or if he just came out and happened to notice a man standing alone in the middle of the parking lot, staring at nothing…but he looks interested, inasmuch as Dean can tell. Maybe angels emote differently than humans. Maybe this guy’s “interested” look is really supposed to represent scorn. Or disgust. Dean stares back at him, but the angel doesn’t hunch his shoulders or slink away. He just stands there. Watching.

Eventually, Dean feels something like a chill steal over his skin, and he resolutely turns away from that creepy house, its equally creepy occupants, and he heads back inside without knowing why he feels so shaken.

~

Sam calls the next day, after Dean has gotten home from work; he’s still sweaty and tired, and all he really wants to do is to take a nap and then make himself one of those shitty Hungry Man microwave dinners (since without Sam here, what’s the point in cooking?), but it’s _Sam_ , and Dean isn’t about to turn him down. He answers his phone, a twinge of pain in his shoulders making him wince. Hunting monsters with his father never made him hurt _this_ much, did it?

Probably more. This is just a different kind of hurt.

“Sammy!” He tries to sound excited. He _is_ …well, he’s happy, at least, if not exactly jumping for joy. Sam breathes out on the other end of the line, and then he laughs.

“Had a long day?”

“That obvious, huh?” Dean drops heavily into the easy chair that faces the television in their living room – he can’t sit on the tiny couch, he can’t. That’s where Sam is supposed to be, sitting right next to him, and he just…it isn’t the same, without that long, lean warmth pressed up against his side, and Sam’s stupidly long legs getting all tangled and him having to put them up on the coffee table (“Fuck decorum,” he had agreed, and they had _laughed_ ). “How’s California?”

“It’s only been a day, I haven’t really gotten out, yet. Still recovering.”

A seed of worry plants itself in Dean’s chest. “You need me to call someone?” He tries to think of the people he knows in California – there aren’t many, but their time traveling with their father made them allies in unlikely places, and he’s sure that at least _one_ of them will be willing to…

Sam laughs. “Stars, _no_ , Dean. I’m fine. I’ve got a friend helping out.”

“A friend?” Sam has friends in California? Not acquaintances, but _friends_? There’s silence on the other end of the line, sort of uncomfortable, and something in Dean’s head clicks.

“Sam,” he says carefully. “Is this one of your followers?”

“ _No_.” A pause. “Yes. Maybe. A little.”

“ _A little_?”

“Look, she sent me an email asking for good luck with a paper, she happened to mention Stanford, and we started talking. Her name is Jessica, she’s really sweet. She’s letting me stay at her apartment until I get my own place.”

“She’s _what_?”

“I _knew_ you’d overreact!”

“I’m not overreacting!” Dean runs a hand over the back of his neck, sighing. _Sam’s a big boy,_ he reminds himself. _He’s come into his powers, he’s got good control over them, he can take care of himself._ “It’s just…you said you’d found a place, and…and there are some real freaks lurking on the internet these days.”

“Jess is…she’s a good person. She’s really smart. She’s a political sciences major.”

There’s a rattling sound in the background, like dishes being piled against each other, and Dean strains to hear, even though he knows it won’t really help. Sam moves the phone away from his face, and Dean hears him say, quietly, “Thank you.”

“What’s she doing now?” he demands, and Sam makes a noise like a wounded buffalo.

“Skies _above_ , Dean, she just brought me some spaghetti! Not everything in California is out to kill me and wear my skin!”

“Great, I’m gonna have nightmares, now. So what, she’s bringing you breakfast in bed?”

“More like late lunch.”

“In bed?”

“ _Dean_.”

He laughs, unable to help it. Needling Sam has always been a great source of fun. “Sorry, just…be careful, Sammy. Maybe not everyone wants to wear your skin, but not everyone wants to help you, either.”

“I know that.” There’s a long pause, and then Sam says, “All right, I…I have to go. I still have to answer some of these emails, and I’m really tired…”

“Yeah, yeah. Important god stuff, I get it. I – ”

The doorbell rings.

He doesn’t even recognize it at first, because when the fuck do they ever get visitors? He holds his cell phone back, checking to see if maybe that’s the sound that call waiting makes, but no, his phone just shows him as being still connected to Sam. He holds it back to his ear, just in time to hear Sam say, “…the doorbell?”

“What?”

“Dude, go answer the door. I’ll call you later, okay?”

“Yeah,” Dean says, and then Sam hangs up. No goodbye or anything, which Dean figures is…well, understandable, if he’s going to call back later, but it still makes something in his chest twist uncomfortably. He ends the call and then pockets his cell phone, and considers, maybe, just… _not_ answering the door. It’s probably Andy, anyways, coming up to see if Dean is interested in having a beer or two. But all Dean is interested in is _sleep_. Still, he wearily hauls himself up from his comfortable chair and makes his way to the front door. He doesn’t bother to glance through the peephole, just swings it open and says, “ _What_.”

An angel looks steadily back at him. Dean blinks, and surreptitiously tries to look around – maybe Andy is…he doesn’t know, showing the new neighbors around? That seems like a weird thing to do, considering they don’t even _live_ in the apartment.

“You’re Dean Winchester, right?”

It’s the short one. The laughing one. Up close, Dean can see that his eyes are green like living things, green like new moss, and his hair is like burnished gold and copper when the sun hits it just right. He isn’t handsome the way movie stars are handsome, but just standing near him makes Dean feel like…

“Uh,” he says, and the angel smiles.

“Your landlord told me. Resident family of gods? Figured I ought to swing by and introduce myself.”

“You’re mistaken,” Dean says. “I’m…My brother is a god. I’m not.”

“Oh? Odd, that’s usually something that runs through bloodlines.”

“Well, this time it didn’t. Was there something you wanted?”

“Just to get to know you.” The angel smiles – his teeth are very white. He sticks out his hand, and Dean eyes it. “I’m Gabriel.”

Dean cautiously gives the angel’s ( _Gabriel’s_ ) hand a few shakes, and then lets go. “Dean, but you already know that. Look, Sam isn’t here, he’s gone to college…”

“Education is important,” Gabriel agrees mildly. Dean frowns.

“I’m just saying that if you wanted to meet the resident god, you’re out of luck.”

“I wouldn’t say _that_. You’re still here, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, but like I said, I’m no god.”

“Doesn’t matter. Are you going to invite me in?”

Fuck, the _nerve_ of this guy. Dean’s caught halfway between wanting to laugh and wanting to punch him in his smug, smiling face. He does neither, only stands there for a moment, thinking, and then cautiously lets the door swing open a little wider. Gabriel steps through, over the threshold, and Dean feels like he’s just…he feels like he’s just started something. Something big.

“Always good to get to know your neighbors,” Gabriel says cheerfully. He glances around the apartment, and looks disappointed. What was he expecting? A big-screen TV? A wet-bar tended by hot, half-naked Asian chicks? Maybe a pet leopard made out of solid, animated gold? It costs like five-thousand bucks to get a manifestation license, and those only last for a year. Even if they _did_ save up enough money, the renewals can’t be paid for with god’s gold, so what’s the point? Only the old gods can afford to have licenses, that or new gods who need them for their day jobs. Sam falls into neither of those categories.

“I was expecting something a little different,” Gabriel says. At least he’s honest. Dean scowls at him, and then retreats into the kitchen in order to get a beer. He eyes the empty spot in the pack, where Sam had pulled a bottle through from one room to the other, freezing it along the way. After a moment, he grabs two lukewarm bottles and then returns to the living room.

Gabriel is lounging on a leather couch, eating pomegranate seeds out of a silver bowl. Dean stares, and then glances around, mouth dropping open.

The couch isn’t the only thing that’s appeared – his wall is now almost _covered_ by the largest television Dean has ever seen, and the hallway seems to have been moved back several feet, making way for…yes, that is _definitely_ a wet bar, and that’s definitely a bikini-clad Asian girl rubbing down the bartop with a perfectly white rag. When she sees Dean looking, she winks.

“What the fuck?”

“I’m sorry,” Gabriel says. He doesn’t sound sorry at all. In fact, he sounds fucking _pleased_. Like Dean’s surprise is exactly what he was going for. “I thought I’d liven the place up a little. Hate to tell you, but your bachelor pad is…a little less rockin’ and a little more ‘Judge Judy on Tivo and a pint of Chubby Hubby at three in the morning’, if you get my drift.”

Dean closes his mouth; his teeth _click_ against each other. Gabriel smirks at him, and then eats another palmful of pomegranate seeds. His mouth is stained red with juice. He has a _very_ pink tongue.

“Get the fuck out,” Dean says. Gabriel’s brows furrow. “I’m serious, _out_. Demanifest all of this shit and leave. The last thing I need is trouble with the Department of Supernatural Security.” He resolutely ignores the come-hither glances being thrown his way by the busty Asian girl, and instead points at the front door. Gabriel stares at him, looking…confused. Vaguely hurt.

“You said you’re human, right? I know you humans are scared of the things you can’t understand…”

“ _Fuck you_ ,” Dean spits. “I grew up in a family of _gods_ , if there’s anything I understand, it’s this kind of shit. And I’m willing to bet my left nut that you don’t have a manifestation license.”

“I don’t need a license.” Gabriel looks unbearably insufferable about it, too, and nevermind that Dean suspects it’s a lie. “I’m an archangel.”

“I don’t care if you’re Odin himself, you’re gonna get me in trouble, and I can’t _afford_ it.” Gabriel rises slowly from the couch, hands raised in seeming apology. He still looks confused. Like a lost puppy. Sam used to get that look, sometimes. Dean tries to ignore how it tugs at some locked-away thing in his chest, and he grabs Gabriel’s shoulder and pulls him bodily from the living room, towards the front door. The air behind him sort of… _shivers_ , and when he looks back, his living room is normal again. No wet bar, no hot chicks, no big screen TV. He breathes a sigh of relief, and opens the front door.

“Next time, fucking _research_ laws before you go around creating shit in other people’s houses,” Dean says severely.

He closes the door in Gabriel’s bewildered face, and he deliberately doesn’t think about how it doesn’t give him as much satisfaction as he thought it would.


	3. Apologies

 

  
“Did you hear?”

Dean never seems to “hear” whenever Ash is around. Dean owns an ancient desktop computer, he’s owned it since the things first came out, it seems, and he hardly ever uses it, except to keep in touch with Sam, and to receive (and delete) the occasional cryptic note from his father, or someone speaking _for_ his father. Ash owns three different computers, and he keeps an eye on the news like a vulture might keep an eye on a dying animal. So Dean wipes the sweat away from his forehead, turns away from the hole he’s been digging, and says, “No, Ash. No, I haven’t.”

“There’s been another murder.”

“Fuck,” Dean says. “Where?”

“Right across town. And get this – the victim? She was a _goddess_.”

Unease splinters down his spine; Dean knows better than most how hard it is to kill a god. They’re stronger and faster than humans, they can heal normal, physical injuries in the course of a single day (though it leaves them drained to do so), they never get sick, and they never have to age, not if they don’t want to. So far, all the murder victims have been otherbeings, but they haven’t been _divine_. This is…this is just _wrong_.

“Who?” he demands, and Ash shrugs.

“Some wind goddess, I dunno. Didn’t catch the name. But they’re increasing police patrols in supernatural neighborhoods.” Ash grins at him. “Might want to limit your speeding for the next couple weeks.”

“You don’t seem worried.”

“Why should I be? I mean, it sucks and all, but it’s not like _I’m_ gonna be a target. This psycho isn’t going around murdering humans.”

Dean turns back to the hole that he’s been digging, staring down into it, fists clenched on the handle of his shovel.

“Dean, buddy, if you’re worried about your brother…”

“Sam is in California,” Dean says sharply. “And he can take care of himself.”

He wants to find out who the goddess was. How she died, _why_ she died. What if Sam comes back to visit? Like, on winter break or something? What if this thing, _whatever_ it is, decides to go after _him_?

Dean spends the rest of the day worried, pretending that what Ash said doesn’t bother him. _Why should I care_. Everyone should care, he thinks. Everyone who says that they’re a decent person, a good person, they _should_ care, because gods and goddesses aren’t any different from them, not in the ways that count. They have families, jobs, hopes, _lives_.

When he gets home, his cell phone buzzes - _1 new message_ \- and he flips it open while he grabs a beer from the kitchen. It’s from a number he doesn’t recognize.

 _Where’s S?_

 _\- J_

Dean scowls at it.

 _California,_ he types. And then, _Why do you care?_ He hits _send_ and waits, staring darkly at his television. His normal-sized television, and the blank wall next to the hallway, and his couch, which could _maybe_ be mistaken for leather, if you were in some sort of horrible accident that left your skin unable to feel anything short of a wrecking ball slamming into your torso.

His phone buzzes.

 _Good. Don’t trust anyone. Stay safe. Someone will contact you,_ is all that it says. No other explanation, and Dean waits a whole ten minutes before he gives up and puts his phone back in his pocket.

He suddenly misses the abrupt chaos that Gabriel had brought into his apartment. It’s ten times better than this slowness, this quiet and smoldering anger at his father, at his brother for choosing to leave, at his friends for not understanding how different he is, how poised between two worlds.

He turns the television on, and goes through three more beers before he falls asleep on the couch, Judge Joe Brown quietly droning in the background.

~

Sam calls every few days. Yes, he’s registered for all his classes, no, he didn’t have any trouble. He’s doing fine, thanks. Jessica is fine. Who asked anything about Jessica? Sam laughs, and Dean pretends that he doesn’t actually care about what his little brother gets up to when he’s away from home.

 _Home_. Home used to be a series of cheap motel rooms, the backseat of his father’s ’67 Chevy Impala, the open road spooling out in front of them like a huge length of black-tar thread. Home used to be Sam’s warm, solid weight next to him while their father slept in the other bed, and in the morning they would eat dry cereal out of those little individual plastic cups, the kinds that came in packs of twenty or more, while their father pieced together information on the demon that killed their mother. Home had been teaching Sam how to play football with a ball they’d found abandoned in a park near their motel, because their father didn’t have the time or the inclination to teach Sam himself.

Now, home is an empty apartment, and a phone call that comes like clockwork every three to four days.

“Dean? Everything okay?”

Dean blinks, and the world comes back into focus. “Yeah,” he says, and rubs his eyes. He feels tired. Sort of guilty. He isn’t sure why – if he’s feeling guilty over tossing that angel out of his home ( _empty apartment_ ), then that’s completely illogical, because the DSS takes the manifestation laws _very_ seriously, and Dean would have been in as much trouble as Gabriel, just for the fact that the apartment is under _his_ name. The world can’t have gods creating and destroying things at will. So why, then? Why does he feel like such a…a piece of shit?

“You don’t sound like it.”

“So’s your face.”

“That doesn’t even make any _sense_ ,” Sam complains, and Dean laughs.

“Of course it does. No, it’s just…one of those angels visited the other day.”

“Really?” Sam sounds like Halloween just came early. “What’d he say? Did you talk? Did you invite him in?”

“He sort of invited himself in, his name is Gabriel, and he’s a _massive_ dick. You know what he did? He came in here and started manifesting fancy couches and…and fuckin’ big screen TVs everywhere! And a _chick_ , Sam! Some chick in a bikini!”

“You mean…an actual person? I’m assuming you don’t mean a baby chicken in a swimsuit.”

“Smartass. Of course I mean a person. Asian chick, with a huge rack.”

“That’s…nice.”

“Nice? There are _laws_ , Sam!”

He can hear Sam pausing, thinking it over. “What’d you do?”

“What do you mean, ‘what’d I do’? I kicked him out. Told him that he should learn the laws before he goes flinging power around like that.”

“Dean…” Sam sounds hesitant, now. Apologetic. “I, uh, guess you didn’t know this, but angels aren’t covered by the manifestation laws, yet.”

Dean blinks. He holds the phone away from his ear and stares at it. Maybe he misheard? Because if he _didn’t_ mishear, then that means that he was…

 _A massive douche,_ he thinks sheepishly, and presses the phone back to his ear.

“Say what?”

“We’ve only known they existed for a few years. Even if there _were_ laws being pushed through, they’d still be tied up in court. You know how long it takes for the DSS to put new laws into effect.”

“But…”

“And the biggest issue isn’t even the timing, it’s the fact that there’s no proof they’re actually _manifesting_ anything.”

“But I _saw_ it!”

“I’m not saying you didn’t, I’m saying that most researchers who are studying this are saying that…the things angels manifest aren’t real. As soon as they stop concentrating, the thing vanishes.”

“But Sam, the TV was _working_. That Asian chick _smiled_ at me when I looked at her! _He was eating grapes_.”

“Well…Andy said that one of them was an archangel, maybe they’re different. But the point is, when he said that the laws don’t apply to angels? He was right. He probably _did_ do some research before he moved in, Dean.”

“Stars,” Dean says faintly.

“Yeah.”

“I’m gonna…I’ll call you later, okay Sam? I just need to think.”

“Sure, sure…But you know, you could just go and explain it to him. Tell him that _you’re_ the one who didn’t research.”

 _But that would be admitting defeat,_ Dean thinks. _I don’t want to be wrong._ He doesn’t like that feeling, like shame bred with anger, when it’s revealed that he knows less than he said he knew. He doesn’t enjoy looking like a fool.

He takes a deep breath.

“Maybe,” he says.

This time, it’s Dean who hangs up first.

~

Dean has never made a pie before. When Sam was twelve, they’d lived for a few weeks in a motel that was just down the street from a bakery, in a small town in Montana. That bakery had made the best pies Dean had ever tasted, and every day he had walked down after school in order to buy two slices, one blueberry and one apple, that he could share with his little brother. Dean couldn’t think of a better foodstuff in the world than pie, except for maybe bacon cheeseburgers, where the bacon was crisp but not crunchy (like eating a pretzel), and with jalapeno slices and extra cheese.

So, Dean considers himself to be a connoisseur of good pie, but he’s never actually set aside the time and ingredients to _create_ one, before.

But he figures that there’s nothing in the world that says “I’m sorry I was a huge asshole” more than a homemade apple pie.

He goes all out, too. Buys the apples from the farmer’s market down the street, instead of the Weiss supermarket he usually goes to. He figures the fruit there will be…fresher? Better quality? The apples look small, and they’re multicolored, not at all like the apples he’s used to. But the woman carefully tending to the potted plants outside reassures him that the apples in supermarkets are large and uniformly red (or green, or gold) because of the hormones fed to the trees as they’re growing. “Hormones” sounds ominous to Dean, and not exactly like something an angel ( _arch_ angel) would appreciate. He takes his apples, his sugar, his flour, all his ingredients home, and then he fires up his ancient computer in order to find a recipe that looks safe for him to try. Nothing that involves fucking curlicues or extra strips of piecrust arranged artfully around the edges of the tin.

He eventually finds a recipe that promises to be “just like grandma used to make” (he wouldn’t know, he barely knew his own mother, let alone his grandparents), and it looks simple enough. Nothing fancy. Just a good, old-fashioned, American apple pie.

The first time around, he sets his pie on fire.

Not on _purpose_ , of course. And he isn’t rightly sure the thing could even be called a pie, since he’s almost certain he used the wrong ratio of ingredients. But he’d bought a dozen apples, so he still has some left. He resolves to try again.

The second pie comes out lopsided, the crust a bit too crisp (though, thankfully, not burnt outright), some stray sugar caramelized on top…but it smells _good_. Dean carefully breaks off an edge of crust and tastes it – it’s a bit floury, but otherwise…it tastes like pie.

He shrugs, and covers it with tinfoil, and then locks the doors behind him and carries it across the street. A pie is a good apology, he thinks. The sort of apology you can offer someone without _actually_ saying that you’re sorry, because the person will see the pie and automatically think “oh, they’re apologizing”. At least, that’s how he _thinks_ it goes. He’s never given someone an apology pie before. When he was ten he gave Sam a cupcake to make him stop crying, but that’s not really the same thing.

The house across the street is one of those tall, spindly-looking places that seem so common in Pennsylvania, stately but almost anorexic, with columns holding up a roofed porch and windows that look like they should have flowers decorating their ledges. Dean ascends the rickety steps towards the front door, and shifts the pie into the crook of his arm, careful not to let it tip to the side. There’s no doorbell – either the house was built without one, or the previous owners had it removed. Or maybe the angels had it removed? Who knows. Dean raises his fist, knocks, and waits, the pie warm against his arm.

The person who answers the door isn’t Gabriel.

“Um,” Dean says, and then abruptly remembers that there had been _two_ angels. An angel and an archangel, and he had seen them, both of them, unloading all of their things. Gabriel was all laughter and crooked smiles and smugness, and the other guy had been…

Well, the other guy _is_ much sterner. He stares at Dean as if he isn’t certain what the next step is, until finally Dean waves feebly and then hefts his pie, as if to display it, _see here, what I’ve made, this is for…well, not you, but your friend, Gabriel, where is he again?_

 _“My name’s Dean Winchester,” he offers, and the angel continues to stare at him, but his gaze is sharper, now, more focused._

 _“Gabriel has mentioned you.” His voice is a deep, gravelly rumble. Dean almost shivers. It sounds like the guy has been gargling broken glass, how the _fuck_ do you get a voice like that? And…and wait, Gabriel has _mentioned_ him? Oh stars, oh shit, Gabriel’s been telling _everyone_ what a massive douche he was, and Dean wouldn’t normally care except for that Sam will be coming home, won’t he? For breaks? Or at least to _visit_ , and Dean doesn’t want him coming back to a neighborhood that hates him for something that his brother did._

“Nothing horrible, I hope,” Dean says. He tries not to sound too nervous, and the angel purses his mouth. Should Dean even be calling them men? From what he’s heard, angels don’t actually have genders, but the body he’s looking at is undeniably male…

“Spirited.”

He shifts the pie again. It isn’t slipping, but it’s something to do with his hands. “Excuse me?”

“He said that you were spirited. I am called Castiel. My host is Jimmy Novak.” Castiel rifles through the pockets of his slacks, and then produces a small, plastic card. “I have his credentials here.”

Dean glances at the card, out of politeness. _Jimmy Novak,_ it says. _Age: 34_ and _Blood Type: B-_.

And then, below that, _Persistent veg._. And next to that is a bright red sticker, practically superglued on, that says  DONOR in big, bold letters. Dean has seen it before, buttons worn and prominently displayed on collars and sleeves at restaurants, shirts barely concealing fresh puncture marks. Vampires have to eat, too, and so long as they drink from volunteers or get their A negative from a blood bank, it’s considered no more illegal than milking a cow.

Dean wasn’t aware that it applied to bodies, too.

“That’s…nice.” Castiel doesn’t even _blink_. He’s got the bluest eyes Dean’s ever seen, but they don’t have tiny laugh lines at their corners, they aren’t… _sparking_. It’s like looking at someone who’s staring back at you through a mask, so you can’t actually see _them_ \- just the vague shape of them, hidden behind plastic and cloth.

“Castiel? What have I told you about scaring the neighbors?”

Dean feels his chest lurch in an odd way as Gabriel’s voice reaches his ears. Only a moment later, and Gabriel himself leans against the doorway, peering over Castiel’s shoulder.

“Oh,” he says. “It’s you.”

He doesn’t sound angry, nor does he sound particularly displeased to see Dean on his doorstep. He sounds completely neutral and, somehow, that’s almost worse. Castiel glances to the side, brow furrowed in befuddlement. “This is Dean Winchester,” he says, unnecessarily. Gabriel rolls his eyes.

“We’ve been through this, Castiel. Introductions are for when you _meet_ someone. Not every time you see someone. Run along and watch documentaries or something, the grownups are talking.”

Castiel tilts his head like a startled bird, and then nods once, abruptly, and disappears back into the house. Dean imagines a swirl of feathers following him, and it seems appropriate.

“Kids,” Gabriel says, and steps out onto the front porch, letting the door swing mostly closed behind him. “Or little brothers, I should say. Hello again, Deano. Come by to tell me my lawn isn’t up to neighborhood standards, maybe?”

Dean flinches, and then steels his resolve, and carefully transfers the pie to his hands. He holds it out, not looking directly at Gabriel’s face.

“I’m an asshole,” he says, quietly. He doesn’t want to admit it. “I made a pie.”

Silence. Dean cautiously glances up – Gabriel’s expression is…shocked? Confused?

“You made a pie?”

“Yeah.” He lifts the pie up a little bit, wishing that it was a bag or something that he could shake, just to drag Gabriel’s attention back to _it_ , instead of his regard being so unwaveringly focused on _Dean_. “It’s, uh. Apple.”

“I love pie.”

Oh, good. Something they have in common. Dean breathes quiet relief when Gabriel finally reaches out and takes the pie from him, holding it the way other people might hold a very small baby, with infinite care and gentleness. Dean’s pretty sure his crappy pie doesn’t deserve that kind of treatment, but hey, whatever. Now lacking something to do with his hands (skies above, he would _kill_ for a beer), he stuffs them into his pockets in order to appear more casual than he feels. He wishes Sam were here. Sam’s always been better at smoothing over ruffled feathers.

He wonders if angels have feathers. Aren’t they supposed to be winged? Dean can’t see any, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Or that they have feathers. Maybe angels are like birds…

“Thank you,” Gabriel says.

…Except bird wings would mean that angels wouldn’t be able to fly, right? Birds have those hollow bones, and the bodies that angels inhabit definitely _don’t_ , so that means they have to have something more like dragon’s wings, and then there’s some other specialized organ or _something_ in them that acts like a big balloon, helping them to fly…

“Want to come inside?”

 _Maybe he just wants to look disapprovingly at you in the privacy of his own home._

“I can’t,” Dean says, apologetically. “I have to go and call my brother.” Fuck _him_ , now Gabriel is going to think that he and Sam have some sort of creepily codependent relationship, like those two Greek twins, what were their names?

 _Casper and Potluck,_ he thinks, even though that’s not it, not at all. It’s just the only thing he can remember. Gabriel looks at him, blinking slowly. Like a cat lying in the sun.

“Family is important,” he says. There’s a shade of ancient hurt there, something that’s achingly familiar, but Dean can’t put his finger on it. And anyways, it’s there and then gone again, so fast he isn’t even sure…“Go and call your brother. I’m sure he’ll be happy to hear from you, Deano.”

“It’s just Dean.” He hears himself say it, snappish. “Not ‘Deano’.”

And Gabriel _laughs_. Short and thrilled and a little bit vicious. A little bit inhuman. Dean’s never heard a laugh like that, before.

“Just Dean, then. Run along. Thanks for the pie, I’m sure I’ll enjoy it.”

His tone is odd. Dean hears Gabriel say “enjoy” and, logically, he knows that you can enjoy eating a pie, that if his is good enough then maybe Gabriel will like it, but he _hears_ it and he thinks of something totally different. Gabriel, his green witchlight eyes half-closed in delight as he licks sugary pie filling from the curve of his thumb, and his wrist brushes against the melting vanilla ice cream on the plate, so of course he has to lick _that_ clean, too, and his other hand strays beneath the table and…

Dean presses the heel of his hand against his eyes and takes a hasty step back. He doesn’t even address that condescending sounding “run along”, only nods and mutters a faint, “Yeah”, before he turns around and stumbles down the porch steps. Tripping over his own feet.

 _I’m not normally this clumsy,_ he thinks, and recalls a monster in Iowa, something that had lived underground, had reached up with invisible limbs in order to trip people, to hopefully knock them unconscious. Then it had killed them, while they were helpless, pulling out their organs and dragging them back beneath the ground.

This reminds Dean of that, sort of, but with less intent to eat his guts.

He glances up at the sky, at the sun, and blinks dark spots from his vision.

He doesn’t see Gabriel, smirking at his back, eyes distant and knowing.


	4. Dreams

 

Dean dreams.

Dean doesn’t normally remember his dreams – Sam would tell him that that’s a sign of a troubled mind, that when you fall into deep sleep so quickly that you can’t remember _anything_ it means that you’re trying to escape something…but Dean never fed into that pseudo-scientific crap. There’s magic and then there’s _magic_ , and dream-reading falls into that former category, reserved for penny psychics at carnivals, and mountebanks decked out in gauzy veils and glittering crystals.

Dean doesn’t put much stock in the mysteries of the human mind, partly because he thinks that the vast majority of humans don’t have much in the _way_ of minds. He isn’t going to give himself preferential treatment.

Still, he dreams, and it’s unusual because he wakes up and _remembers_. They’re mostly half-fictionalized memories of his childhood, of driving across the country with Sammy held in his lap. Sam, at three years old, and Dean trying to feed him spoonfuls of Apple Jacks grown soggy with the milk they’d been sitting in for the past forty minutes.

Dean closes his eyes.

 _”You have to protect your brother,” his father says, and yes, he’ll protect Sammy, he’ll save him when he needs saving and he’ll make sure he eats all his food and drinks his milk and grows up to be big and strong._

 _“Dean, look!” Sammy shouts, and suddenly Dean is nine, he’s watching as Sam balances precariously on the roof of a beat-up truck, and Dean has no idea how Sammy got up there but he knows that something awful is going to happen, he knows it like he knows he has to take another breath. Sam spreads his arms out like wings, and Dean sees…he sees…_

 _He sees Gabriel, leaning against the door to their motel room, hanging in midair, attached to no building, and with no room beyond it. It’s just an empty door, and Gabriel’s eyes are so green. Green like night-flying things, insects that glow in the dark. Glowworms. Fireflies._

 _“You have to catch him,” Gabriel says, and Dean sees Sam tip over, sees him fall. He tumbles towards the parking lot, and Dean lunges, even though he knows that he’s a dozen feet away, he won’t catch Sammy in time, he can’t…_

 _And then he’s holding Sam, breathing hard, and his little brother is laughing, laughing, and Gabriel smiles at him. His smile is as bewitching as his eyes._

 _“Good job, Just Dean,” he says, and then his shoulders spread out, like huge blankets made of light, Gabriel is turning into a bird right in front of Dean’s and –_

Dean opens his eyes again.

“Fucking weird dreams,” he complains groggily, and then drags himself out of bed, utterly certain that the day is either going to be crap or strange or _both_ , because he apparently can’t stop thinking of Gabriel. Part of it is missing Sam, too, otherwise he wouldn’t have had that dream (and what had been _with_ that dream, anyways? People turning into birds and shit, that was bizarre, though maybe, he thought, less bizarre for _angels_ ). But why was _Gabriel_ there?

Dean has never believed in dream-reading, but he _does_ believe that if you dream about some _one_ , as opposed to some _thing_ , it tends to mean more.

He groggily shuffles into his apartment’s (it used to be _their_ apartment) kitchen and turns the coffeemaker on.

~

“…so I gave him a pie.”

Ash squints at him, head tilted to the side. He’s holding a sandwich today, not a chicken potpie, but it’s the fanciest sandwich Dean’s ever seen on this site. It looks like Ash might have ordered it from some specialty place, some restaurant that focuses exclusively on making the most intensely complicated sandwiches in the state. There are probably about four different kinds of cheese on there, and none of them look like American.

“Is that standard angel etiquette, then? Giving someone a pie?”

“No. I don’t know.” Dean sighs, and presses the ball of his thumb to his right temple. “I mean, it just seemed like a good idea at the time. And he said that he liked pie.”

“Well, then he’ll forgive you. You give a man who likes pie a pie, then you’re set for life.”

“I don’t think they’re like dogs, Ash. I doubt you can just give them a treat and expect them to immediately love you.”

“It works with gnolls,” Ash points out, and Dean snorts.

“Yeah, because gnolls _are_ dogs, dude. They’re canines. That’s their species.”

“Hey, no one’s going around calling _you_ a dog.” Ash pauses. “Well, not lately. What’s up with that, anyways? Haven’t seen you around the bar scene for a couple of weeks.”

“I don’t know, man.” Dean watches Ted and Stellan kneel down and haul an I-beam onto their broad shoulders. Ted’s hooves dig biting furrows into the ground as he takes the steel’s weight. It hasn’t rained in over a month, and the dust puffs up and coats Ted’s legs up to his calves, leaving his fur tawny-gold. “I just haven’t been feeling it.”

“‘Haven’t been feeling it’? Dean Winchester, Casanova extraordinaire, inventor of the Panty Dropper martini, inspiration to us all – ”

“Knock it off,” Dean laughs. “It was never like that.”

“Different partner every week, sometimes two at once…I’m having trouble seeing how it ‘wasn’t like that’, man.”

“It’s not like it was something I set out to do.” Dean carefully pulls his own lunch from his back pocket – a pack of beef jerky. Not as fancy as Ash’s lunch, but it’ll get him through the rest of the day…at least, until he can get home and order a pizza or something. “It just sort of happened.”

“Oh woe is you, cursed with uncommonly good looks.”

“No, seriously.”

“I get it, man. I’m sure it helped that it wasn’t exactly, you know, a _hardship_ , having a bunch of hot ladies throw themselves at you.” Ash pauses. “Or, you know, dudes. Policy of non-discrimination and all that.”

“I’m so glad you approve of all my hook-ups,” Dean says dryly, and tears the packet of beef jerky open with his teeth. He spits the plastic into his palm, and then tugs the ziplock seal open and pulls out a chunk of meat, popping it into his mouth and chewing idly.

“I’m just saying, something’s changed. Did you find religion or something? Did you join a cult that doesn’t let you bone anyone?”

“ _No_. Sun’s sake, Ash, say it a little louder, I’m not sure the people in New York heard you.” Ash laughs, and takes a huge bite out of his sandwich. Mayonnaise and tomato juice drips over his fingers, and Dean glances away.

“I just haven’t felt like it,” Dean clarifies.

“You just haven’t found anyone who’s held your interest, that’s all. Come to Harvelle’s with me tonight, there’s this one goth chick who’s been coming in every so often. Apparently she’s got piercings that aren’t visible to the naked eye, if you get my drift. I can introduce you.”

Dean wonders what this girl is like – does she have blonde hair? Is she a red-head, or a brunette? Dean thinks of the tattoo of protection on his chest and wonders if, maybe, she has ink, as well.

Maybe she has green eyes. Green like will-o-the-wisps in a swamp. Green like…

“Sure,” he says, and closes his eyes, and pushes the thought of _other beings_ from his mind. “Yeah, I don’t have anything else to do. Why not?”

He isn’t lying – if Ash hadn’t asked him to go to the bar, he would have ended up on his couch, pizza in one hand and beer in the other, watching reruns of Cops or something. Instead, when six o’clock rolls around he finds himself climbing into his truck and following Ash to Harvelle’s Roadhouse – he’s never questioned why Ellen and Jo Harvelle showed up in Pennsylvania only a few months after he and Sam decided to settle down, and he isn’t about to start now. Suffice to say, he remembers Ellen from when he was a kid, and she was always kind to him. When her daughter was born, Dean remembers feeling as protective of her as he was of Sam. After the fire, Ellen let them stay with her, for a while…her husband had objected, at first, what with the whole neighborhood in an uproar over such a tragic accident…but, eventually, he had given in.

Now that Dean thinks about it, Bill Harvelle died in a fire, too, albeit a fire of his own making.

When he walks through the front door, Ash trailing along behind him, Jo glances up from where she’s tending bar and smiles at him. Dean can never tell if she looks at him like a big brother or like a potential lover. He isn’t sure which he’d prefer – on the one hand, he’s known her since she was a baby, and there’s a part of him that will always look at her the same way he looks at Sam: as someone who needs to be protected, and never mind that she’s a demigoddess, and she can cook him with a lightning bolt faster than he can say “Nice tits”...not that he would, of course, but still.

But, on the other hand, she really _is_ hot.

“Evening, boys,” Jo calls out, and Dean smiles at her as he slides onto one of the bar stools. “Been a while since I saw you here, Dean.”

“You know how it is,” Dean says with a shrug. “All work and no play.”

“Makes Dean a dull boy,” she finishes, and then slides a shot of tequila towards a tengu sitting at the other end of the bar. “Mom’s been worrying about you.”

“Ellen worries about everyone. Start lining up shots, Jo, I’m getting drunk tonight.”

“Hey, hey,” Ash protests. “I thought I was introducing you to hot goth chick!”

Dean shrugs as Jo arches an eyebrow and then begins lining up shot glasses. “You mean Madison? I doubt she’s coming in tonight.”

“Why’s that?”

Jo gestures vaguely over her shoulder, towards one of the windows. “Full moon.”

It takes Ash a few seconds to get it, and Dean shakes his head as Jo leans over to pour him a few shots of whiskey. “Oh. _Oh_. I…never would have guessed?”

“Don’t say it like it’s some sort of horrible disease,” Dean says. “This isn’t a human bar, Ash, you know that. Why’s a werewolf so strange?”

“It’s not! _She_. She’s not. I just didn’t expect it.”

“Uh-huh.” Dean knocks back a shot, wincing as the alcohol burns on the way down. Jo watches him, eagle-eyed, so young. And she’s so beautiful. Yet, when Dean looks at her, when he looks at _any_ of the women in the bar, goddesses and otherbeings alike, he just…can’t bring himself to anticipate the end of the night,

There’s a woman, sitting at the other end of the bar. She glances at him, and Dean catches the movement in the mirror behind the counter. She’s pretty, with dark hair and a quick smile, and she’s his type, too – curvy, obviously interested.

She has green eyes.

He downs another shot, and then pushes himself away from the bar. The woman smiles wider as he approaches. She has a small gap between her teeth.

“Dean Winchester,” he says simply. “Let me buy you a drink?”

“I like a guy who doesn’t beat around the bush. I’m Lisa Braeden.” There’s an obvious double entendre there, and Dean grins as he takes the seat next to Lisa. Her leg shifts, and their knees press together as Dean raises his hand towards Jo.

“Another drink for the lady,” he says, and Jo tilts her head at him, but Lisa…

When Lisa smiles, her eyes crinkle at the corners.

He takes her home. He isn’t sure if it’s her he wants, or something ( _someone_ ) else entirely, but he knows that he isn’t about to turn her offer down. She tells him that she has a kid on the drive there, and Dean looks at her, confused.

“I know I’m not a very good mother,” Lisa says. “I’m trying, just…Sometimes I need a break. And he’s…kids are so hard. Wonderful, but hard.”

“I can understand that.” Even though Dean would never have done that to Sam, would never have left him with some strange person while Dean went out and got his rocks off. “What’s his name?”

“Ben. I always thought I would name my first son after his father, but…well. That didn’t work out.”

Lisa doesn’t say anything more about Ben, and Dean holds the door open for her when they reach his apartment. He sees the light on his answering machine blinking, impatient, but Lisa pulls him towards the bedroom. She’s smiling, and she tugs at his jacket, pushes it from his shoulders and lets it fall to the floor.

They fuck without turning the sheets back, and it’s good, it’s very good, but Dean feels distracted throughout. He wonders if Lisa notices it, but if she does she keeps herself from saying anything about it – she smiles and touches him, she kisses his neck. Dean hums and wants to reassure her that she’s wonderful, but he keeps thinking about that blinking red light on his answering machine. Was it Sam that he missed?

Afterwards, he drapes a throw blanket over Lisa’s hips and cups his palm to the curve of her breast, kisses her temple, and then pads naked into the kitchen. The tiles are cold against his feet, and he leans against the counter, rubbing his arms as he hits the play all button on the answering machine.

 _“Hola, amigo!”_ It’s Gabriel’s voice; Dean stands up a little straighter, glances to the side as if, somehow, the message will summon Gabriel _here_. There’s no one there, of course. _“Hope your life isn’t sucking. Just calling to tell you that the pie was…interesting. But unmistakably pie-shaped, so good job, Just Dean.”_

Dean freezes. He rewinds the message and replays it, again, three times, and it doesn’t change. _Good job, Just Dean._

“Just a coincidence,” he says. His voice seems to echo strangely in the empty kitchen. He imagines he can feel Lisa’s presence in the apartment, like an intruder. Except he invited her inside. He _wanted_ her here.

Didn’t he?


	5. Connections

 

Lisa is gone by the time Dean wakes up in the morning – there’s a plate of pancakes, covered with tinfoil, sitting on his kitchen table, and a note on his nightstand. It’s almost eleven o’clock, and Dean stares up at the ceiling for a few moments, not wanting to move, before he reluctantly hauls himself out of bed.

 _Thanks for the stress relief,_ the note says. _Hope you like chocolate chip pancakes._

Dean’s never had them before, and he wasn’t even aware that he had chocolate chips (or pancake mix, for that matter), but when he checks his cupboard he finds an open box of instant pancake mix, and another one beside that, still sealed. There’s a half-empty bag of chocolate chips in his freezer; he figures he must have bought all this at some point and then just forgot it was there. He’s probably done a lot of things like that, since Sam left. He hasn’t needed to keep track of groceries, so he’s just been buying whatever catches his eye.

Pancake mix and chocolate don’t go bad, do they?

Apparently they don’t, because the pancakes are delicious, and Dean eats all of them before getting dressed and glancing once (only once) at his answering machine. Is that common social etiquette? Calling someone to let them know that the apology baking they gave you was…well, if not good, then at least the right shape?

Dean bites his bottom lip, and then slips on his boots and heads out.

The day is balmy, breezy, and intensely unusual for the tail end of a Pennsylvanian summer. Whether it’s caused by some freak act of nature or a rogue weather deity, Dean doesn’t care – it makes his walk across the street that much more pleasant. He doesn’t have to work today, he realizes. It’s Saturday.

His phone buzzes. Dean pauses in front of Gabriel’s house (is Castiel still there? Dean hasn’t seen him around the neighborhood at all…) and pulls his cell from his pocket, flipping it open. It’s a text from Ash (texting being one of the few things that Ash does that Dean can do equally as well, when it comes to technology).

 _You hear about the new guy?_

Dean rolls his eyes, and quickly texts back, _No_. He wonders if Ash’s almost pathological need to stay on top of new information could be considered as some sort of mental illness.

The phone buzzes again.

 _His name’s Fred_ , the text says. Dean signs, and then he pockets his phone, ascends the steps of Gabriel’s porch, and knocks.

Once again, it isn’t Gabriel who answers, but Castiel, which, Dean supposes answers _that_ particular question. The angel is still wearing the same suit as last time, or else one exactly like it, and when he sees Dean his expression lightens, fractionally, from “inscrutably stony” to simply “inscrutable”.

“Dean Winchester,” he says gravely. Dean blinks.

“Uh, yeah.”

“Are you here to provide us with more baked goods?”

“I’m gonna go with ‘no’ on that one. Is Gabriel…here?”

“He is,” Castiel intones. And then doesn’t elaborate. He stands there, staring intensely, while Dean resists the urge to hunch his shoulders, or worse, to swear at him.

“Can I _talk_ to him?”

“He is speaking with my brother.” Oh. Dean rubs the back of his neck, glancing away.

“Well, uh. Tell him I dropped by, I guess.”

“For what purpose?”

Dean shrugs, exasperated. “I don’t know, just…tell him I wanted to see how you guys were doing? I didn’t really have a set goal in mind, dude.”

Castiel resumes his silence, but at least it’s thoughtful, this time, rather than confused. After a moment, he pushes the door open a bit further, revealing a little bit of the front hall just beyond.

“I am certain he will not be long,” Castiel says. “I believe, in that case, it is customary for one human to invite the other into their home.”

“You’re not human,” Dean points out, but he steps over the threshold anyways, and Castiel lets the door swing shut behind him.

The house is…ordinary. It looks like any normal house, with a few paintings hung on the walls and rugs on the floor, and all the furniture neatly arranged. There’s a television against the far wall of the living room that Castiel leads him into – it’s not a big screen, like the one Gabriel created in Dean’s apartment, but it’s a decent size. The couch and all the chairs look comfortable, but not exactly new. Dean had been expecting…he isn’t sure. Some sort of holy altar? Maybe a shrine to Yahweh or something? He should know better, he’s aware of that, but still – angels are completely new to him.

“I believe it is customary to offer a guest a seat,” Castiel says gravely, and then he turns one of the large, squashed armchairs to face Dean, as easy as if he were turning around a stool. The thing must weigh at _least_ a hundred pounds, but Castiel doesn’t seem to care that he’s just lifted and turned a large easy chair without so much as blinking.

“Uh, thanks.” He sinks down into the chair, hands resting nervously on his knees, and Castiel, after a moment, takes a seat on the couch opposite him.

“Gabriel shall join us shortly,” he says. “He merely needs to report to Zachariah.” Castiel pauses, then, and his eyes widen, as if he’s surprised. Or maybe afraid? Do angels even have anything they need to be afraid of? Castiel’s lips press together, a thin, pale line…so it’s less like he’s afraid to talk, and more like he’s worried he’s already said something?

“’Report’?” Dean questions. “Who’s Zachariah? Gabriel’s brother?”

“Our brother,” Castiel says reluctantly. “And our superior.”

 _Superior_? What the fuck?

“Superior how?”

“In every way. He is the eldest, and the strongest. In the absence of our Father, he is the caretaker of Heaven, and of all our brothers and sisters.”

The lights above them flicker – it’s so faint that Dean barely notices it, but he _does_ notice the hand that suddenly lands on his shoulder. He jolts, startled, and feels only marginally better when he catches a whiff of peppermint, chocolate, and Gabriel’s cheek brushes against his as the archangel leans over the back of the chair.

“Not telling embarrassing family stories without me, I hope,” he says. There’s an edge to his voice, like a shard of ice floating in a still pond, but when Gabriel leans away and Dean glances up at him his expression is one of serene contentment.

“Zachariah is our brother,” he says.

“I sort of got that.”

“I don’t think you do, actually. He’s not _just_ our brother – he’s everything. He’s our sibling, he’s our general, he’s our priest…Angels aren’t like humans, little buddy. You can’t assume that we think the way you do. I mean, _technically_ , Zachariah isn’t even our brother, since we don’t have a binary gender system.”

“He’s…wait, what? You’re _what_?”

“I do not want to have this conversation again,” Castiel announces abruptly. He stands up, and then nods at Dean. “It was a pleasure to see you again, Dean Winchester. May you have good fortune in all of your future endeavors.”

He sweeps from the room like some sort of offended bird of prey; Gabriel barks laughter, and then drops down onto the seat that Castiel had just vacated.

“Ignore him,” Gabriel says. “There are times when he just doesn’t understand how things work. So, Dean, what brings you here? You’re not carrying baked goods this time, I see.”

“I don’t really know,” Dean admits. “I just…thought I’d come see you. See how you’re doing. Are you settling in okay?”

Gabriel looks at him, steady, unblinking. “Don’t try to play the happy homemaker,” he says softly. “If you’re here because you want to ask questions, then ask questions. Don’t cover it with false pretense.” And then his expression brightens again, like the sun peeking out from behind a swirl of clouds. “You want a beer? Let me guess, you’re a dark ale kind of guy.” He holds up his hand, and then clicks his fingers - Dean jumps as a cold bottle of beer appears on the table in front of him. _Sam Adams’ Black Lager_ , the label says. Dean picks it up and cradles it between his thighs.

“Bit early for beer,” he says, and Gabriel shrugs. “That was a real question, by the way. Not just…me trying to be a good neighbor. How are you doing? Castiel seems…” He trails off, unable to pinpoint how Castiel _seems_. Sort of lost. Sort of confused. Determined. Gabriel leans back, huffing, blowing a lock of hair away from his eyes.

“It’s different,” he offers; it sounds like it’s something he doesn’t necessarily _want_ to talk about, but he’s answering Dean anyways. “I haven’t lived like this for…oh, a few thousand years. And it’s _all_ new to Castiel. He’s young, sure, but you’d think he was a newborn with the way he reacts to some things. He got to pet a dog for the first time, yesterday. I swear he was this close to crying.” Gabriel holds his thumb and forefinger a bare inch apart, and then lets his hand drop back down. “Yeah. Different, but good.”

And then he falls silent. But the quiet lasts for so short a time that Dean thinks Gabriel is the sort who’s incapable of letting a room remain noiseless. He has to fill up every inch of space with sound.

Dean opens his mouth, and asks a question he hadn’t even realized he wanted the answer to.

“Why are you here?”

Gabriel _looks_ at him. From the other room, what Dean presumes to be the kitchen, there comes the faint sound of pots and pans being moved, ceramic clinking. Castiel puttering about. What’s the difference between brothers who are gods and brothers who are angels? Dean knows that there are some gods, gods made of the same starstuff, who keep with each other in ways that humans think of as…crude. Unnecessary. But gods are not humans, and _angels_ are not humans. Are Gabriel and Castiel really brothers? Or do they just call themselves that? Are they here to get away from their family?

Are they lovers?

“Do we need a reason?”

“I think everyone needs a reason for what they do.” Oh stars. He said _we_. Dean feels something in his chest curl up on itself like an injured millipede; he scolds that stupidly hopeful part, telling himself that there are plenty of people out there with green eyes, plenty of people who will tell him that his pie is most definitely pie-like. Plenty of angels, even.

“We’re here for work,” Gabriel says. “The house, the nice neighborhood, the fancy knickknacks…It’s a package deal. I’m here because I know Earth. Castiel is here…well. Because he’s Castiel. He’s one of the best soldiers in the garrison.”

 _Soldier? What does he mean by soldier?_ But Dean doesn’t ask, because he has the feeling that, unlike his previous question, this is one that Gabriel will refuse to answer. “So you’ve been here before? Earth, I mean.”

“Oh, a long time ago. Back when the old gods were still the only gods. This was back when I was young and rebellious, mind, so I moved in circles that would have made my brothers and sisters cry. There was a time when I was Loki, not Gabriel.”

Something in his stomach lurches. These days, identity theft isn’t exactly a problem, but a thousand years ago? Three thousand? Maybe it was simpler, then. “ _Loki_? You impersonated a god?”

“Who’s to say I impersonated him?” Gabriel asks with a wink, and then laughs, low and dark. “That’s a mystery for another day, though. Drink your beer. Be merry. You’re too tense, homeskillet.”

“Never call me that,” Dean says, but he dutifully cracks open his bottle of beer and takes a sip. He knows it’s just Sam Adams, but it tastes better, somehow. Like it’s sweeter because Gabriel made it. “There’s a good reason to be tense, though.”

He doesn’t know why he said that. Except he does, he just dreads admitting it. Admitting it will mean that Ash is right, that all the police cars and the overhead patrols are _necessary_ , and at least Sam is out of the house, at least Sam is somewhere far away, safe.

 _This thing jumps states like rats jump ships,_ Dean thinks. _What’s stopping it from jumping all the way to California?_

“And what would that reason be?”

He doesn’t want to say it. Sam is gone. Sam is safe. Dean has stayed behind. Dean opens his mouth and says, “The murders.”

And Gabriel’s eyes go hard as flint. Brief, and then gone again, and Dean holds the beer in his hand and feels the cold seeping into his palm. Is it from the chill of the bottle? Or is that part of him that recognizes that Sam could be taken from him in an instant? The last victim had been a goddess. A _goddess_.

“I’ve heard,” Gabriel says softly. “I wouldn’t worry about them. I’m sure the killer will be caught soon.”

 _But what if they aren’t?_ “You’re probably right. It’s just…They’re considering it a nationwide thing, now, since it’s happened in a bunch of different states. I’m just…worried about my brother.”

“You wouldn’t be a decent being if you didn’t. If it makes you feel better, you can go and call him.”

Dean tries to smile. “Trying to get me out of the house?”

“A little bit.” Gabriel answers Dean’s grin with one of his own, not as small, not as quiet. Nothing about Gabriel is entirely quiet. “I’ve been informed that I’ll be having company soon. Work-related.”

“I’ll just get out of your hair, then.” Dean pushes himself up from the chair, careful not to spill his still-full beer. It really is too early for him to be drinking, no matter what people say about him and alcohol. “It was nice seeing you again.”

“Hey.” Dean pauses; Gabriel is looking up at him, his eyes half-closed, but the green of them is so strong, so _there_. He suddenly feels warmer than before. “You can be in my hair anytime you want. Don’t be a stranger.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, and swallows. “Yeah, okay.”

He shows himself out, Gabriel staring after him as he walks away, and it’s only once he’s finally out of the house that he realizes his beer has yet to grow any warmer.

~

Dean calls Sam. Normally it’s the other way around, but Sam has yet to get in contact with him today, and it’s almost five in the evening, so Dean feels perfectly justified. He’s almost ninety-eight percent sure that Sam doesn’t have any classes in the evening.

Sure enough, Sam picks up after a few rings, and Dean can hear traffic in the background, and people talking, laughing. The sounds of a college town. Dean can practically smell the fast food, can almost hear the tromp of thousands of feet, passing by on their way to class, and…

“Dean?”

“I’m here,” he says automatically, and then blinks, and that brief vision of Stanford is gone. “Yeah, I was just…calling.”

“I can see that.” Sam sounds like he’s about to laugh. Which is, you know, a _wonderful_ feeling, having your little brother laughing at you. Even if he _is_ a god. “But _why_ are you calling? I have class in twenty minutes. Haven’t you looked at my schedule?”

Dean keeps drawing a blank, and, after a moment, Sam sighs.

“The one I put up on the fridge?”

Dean makes a detour into the kitchen and, sure enough, there’s a piece of paper hung up on the fridge, a list of unintelligible class names (what the fuck is “BISCI 210”?), and, beside them, days and times. Dean drags his finger down the list until he comes to PSYCH 100, M, 5:30 – 6:45.

“Oh,” he says. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine. Was there something you needed to talk about?”

There’s probably something to be said about the way Sam asks that question, something about how he uses “needed” instead of “wanted”, but Dean cares less about that and more about the question that’s suddenly popped, fully-formed, into his brain – because he hadn’t called Sam with any specific goal in mind, and yet here he is, ready to ask his brother’s opinion on something that might change _everything_.

“How would you feel if I started dating an angel?” he demands, and the question itself is sort of…sort of _assuming_ that Dean will get a yes, but he’s been thinking about green eyes and cold beer for the past few days, and Dean just…really, _really_ needs to get this off his chest.

Sam is silent for a long moment, and Dean almost, _almost_ panics, because Sam is usually quick to form his opinions, even quicker to give them, and Dean has always been able to rely on Sam’s fast thinking, _always_. If Sam doesn’t have something to say about this, then Dean will _know_ something is wrong – it’s only when something is wrong that Sam tries to hold his tongue.

And then Sam says, “Anyone I know?” and Dean realizes that _yes_ , something is off. Because Sam is asking. He’s fishing for information, which means there’s something here that’s preventing him from saying “yes” outright.

“You don’t know any angels,” Dean says.

“Yeah, but I’m thinking I should, if you’re planning on asking one out. Is it one of the new neighbors? That one with the trench coat seemed like your type.”

Dean laughs, but a part of him still feels uneasy. “Like you know what my type is.”

“I know what it is when it comes to women. Short, brunette, curvy, sort of reserved…”

“Dude, you’re edging into ‘creepy’ territory right there.”

“It’s true! Not my fault I’m observant. So, spill. It’s trench coat angel, isn’t it?”

Dean swallows. “Nope. Gabriel.”

Another long pause. And then, “Really? That’s…huh.”

“Spit it out, Sammy.”

“No, it’s just…he seemed nice, sure, he just seemed sort of…not personable.”

“Let me get this straight, you’re saying that the guy in the trench coat, the guy with the thousand yard stare and the impeccably pressed slacks, you’re saying _that_ guy is more personable than Gabriel.”

“Not personable, just…The way you talked about him before. You were pissed off.”

“And I apologized! I’m man enough to admit when I’m being a dick.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“What _are_ you saying, Sam? Because if you think this is a bad idea, don’t fuckin’ dance around it, just spit it out.”

“I just think you’re too similar for it to work.”

“Don’t tell me you buy into that whole ‘opposites attract’ spiel,” Dean protests.

“No, I just think you’d end up butting heads more often than not.”

Dean huffs, wearily arching his back, trying to work out the kinks there. He hates days when he has to work the early shift – he doesn’t like getting up at six in the morning any more than the next guy, even though he’s probably more accustomed to it. Their father liked for them to be moving as soon as first light bled over the horizon – Dean’s used to doing things ( _hunting things_ ) on little to no sleep.

“Are you just trying to mess with me?” he demands irritably. “No. You know what? I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna ask Gabriel out.”

“If that’s what makes you happy.”

“Don’t be fucking patronizing, Sam. I know it. I _know_. Maybe, if this even goes anywhere…yeah, maybe we’ll end up fighting a lot. Maybe we _are_ similar. But I think it’ll be worth it.”

He can almost hear Sam smiling – indulgent, a little bit fond, a little bit exasperated. That’s what Sam’s smiles are usually like, when it comes to Dean.

“I believe you,” he says. “Just…be careful.”

“What, with Gabriel?”

“With Gabriel, with work, with…everything. All the news stations are covering the murders in Penn’s Creek. Even way out here.”

Dean stills, feeling his heart thump painfully in his chest. “There’s been another one?”

“No. Not yet. Everyone seems sure there will be, though.”

“They’ve got police patrols running all the time, Sam, day and night. No one is going to try anything.”

“Humor me.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll lock the doors.”

Sam makes a soft sound, relieved and happy. “Thank you.”

“No problem. Now get to your class, dude, you’ve got like three minutes.”

There’s a brief pause, and then Sam swears, “ _Shit_ ,” and an instant later he hangs up. Dean closes his cell phone and pockets it, smiling, but unable to think of a concrete reason as to why. Maybe it’s Sam, just being _him_ , being goofy and good-natured and so mother hen-ish, even from almost three thousand miles away.

Or maybe it’s Gabriel. Gabriel with the green eyes and the answers that don’t really answer _anything_ , Gabriel telling him not to worry, smiling at him as he left with that smile that isn’t fully a smile, but a smirk, as well.

Dean leaves the kitchen, the cold tiles, and he heads for the bathroom. A hot shower will ease his hurting back, and will give him time to think about how he wants to go about asking Gabriel out.

~

Dean has a problem.

As far as problems go, it’s sort of a stupid one – it’s not like he has people breaking into his apartment on a regular basis, and it’s not like he’s sick or anything. It’s just…it’s important to _him_.

And the problem is that he doesn’t have Gabriel’s phone number. The message that Gabriel had left on his machine has long since been deleted, so Dean can’t check the caller ID, Gabriel has never called Dean’s cell, and neither of the angels are listed in the phone book. He imagines that he could just cross the street and ask Castiel for Gabriel’s number (or their number, even; Dean isn’t sure if they have cell phones, or just a house phone), but then he realizes how _fucking creepy_ that would seem.

Which leaves him with no choice. He can’t just casually call Gabriel with the pretense of talking about how their days have been (even though he thinks that Gabriel would probably see right through it anyways); he has to actually go over to the angels’ home and ask him out. Out loud. _In person_.

 _Fuck,_ Dean thinks. Repeatedly. _Constantly_. For the next several days.

Because he wants to be able to devote an entire day to this endeavor. It’s been literally _years_ since he went out on a proper date with someone – when they had been traveling with their father, Dean had been mostly limited to one-night stands, hook-ups in bars, that sort of thing. Not exactly relationships he wanted to continue, to be honest. But Gabriel is different. Gabriel deserves better. So Dean waits until Saturday, and before that he occasionally freezes and wonders, _what will I wear, what will I say, what if he tells me “no” and laughs in my face? Even more terrifying, what if he says “yes”? Do we go out to eat? Should I ask him out to dinner?_

Dinner. Dinner is too intimate. Maybe lunch? He thinks he remembers Sam saying something like that, before – that breakfast is for families, because you can wake up and roll out of bed and just _go_ , and your family won’t care about how you look or whether you fall asleep in your eggs. And then…and then lunch is for friends and acquaintances, because that’s like, the neutral time of day, or something, and dinner is for when you want to be intimate. Something about how the nighttime is romantic, and candles, and all sorts of bullshit that Dean doesn’t understand. But the point is, he can’t ask Gabriel out to dinner. Not this soon.

By the time Saturday rolls around, Dean is utterly convinced that Gabriel, however unknowing, is going to be the death of him. He’s set out three different outfits over the course of four days, and each one he’s ended up putting back, and then taking it out again, _multiple times_. A suit is too fancy, and besides, Dean hasn’t worn his only suit for years and it probably doesn’t fit him anymore. But, at the same time, jeans feel too informal. All his jeans have holes in them, anyways. He finally settles on some slacks that Sam once made him buy, and a white button-down that Sam had said would go well with just about anything. Dean has to pause for a moment when he realizes that most of his clothes have been picked out _by his little brother_ , but he shrugs it off. Sam is the one who knows styles, not Dean, and as long as he doesn’t tell anyone it won’t cause any harm.

Dean dresses, and as he does so he hears his phone vibrating in the kitchen. Shirt half-buttoned, socks and boots in one hand, he leaves the bedroom in order to check it – maybe it’s Sam, texting to let him know that he was being an ass, earlier? That if Dean wants to date an angel, that’s fine with him, and he’s so sorry for having a stick up his ass earlier, can Dean ever _forgive_ him?

 _Not likely,_ Dean thinks, and grabs his phone from the counter, flipping it open and checking his messages.

 _Drinks with Fred tonight,_ it says. _You coming?_ The number is Ash’s, but it still takes Dean a moment or two to remember that Fred is the new guy, the one Ash told him about. He works evening shifts, and Dean usually works mornings and afternoons, so they haven’t seen each other all that much, but Ash isn’t so picky when it comes to his hours. Apparently, the two have befriended each other, if they’re going out drinking together.

Dean quickly texts back, _No, might have a date_ , and then closes his phone and pockets it. Dean doesn’t think he’s even _seen_ Fred before. Maybe he can meet up with Ash on Monday, and they can all get together and go out boozing. Make general fools of themselves. That sounds like it could be fun.

Smiling slightly, Dean heads into the living room, pulls on his socks and boots, and then heads out.

Summer is ending, but during the day it can still reach temperatures of eighty or more; today is on the balmier side of the spectrum, and Dean relishes the breeze that rushes through his hair and makes his shirtsleeves ripple. It’s the perfect day for…for going for a walk, he thinks. Maybe he can ask Gabriel to go with him to the park. Dean’s never really seen the point of parks – there are trees all over the place in Pennsylvania, and bushes, and flowers, too. Why do people drive miles to go to a park when they could just as easily step out into their backyard? But it seems like a nice, neutral place to take someone, and Dean’s never…do angels even _date_? What if even asking Gabriel out is considered too forward? At least, if he just offers to walk with him to the park, Dean might be able to explain it away as a…a friendly, _neighborly_ human gesture.

As opposed to, you know, Dean trying to ask him out.

When he rings the doorbell, it takes several minutes for anyone to answer, and by the time the door _does_ open Dean feels like he’s about to vibrate out of his skin. He almost sighs with relief when the tension finally eases.

Except…apparently Castiel isn’t on door duty today, because it’s Gabriel who’s leaning against the doorframe, staring at him. Angels, Dean has noticed, have a way of _looking_ at you in ways that are disconcerting without being obvious about it. He’s pretty sure they don’t blink as much as humans do. Don’t their eyes get dried out? Doesn’t it hurt their heads?

“Dean!” Gabriel says, after a moment. “I was _actually_ just thinking about you.”

“You…were?” He’s not sure how to respond to that. Is that a good thing? Or was Gabriel thinking about how much of a dick he is?

Gabriel nods. “Want to come inside? I’ve been trying to teach Castiel the rules of rugby, but so far, no dice.”

“Actually,” Dean says, and it feels like his voice is too loud, too strong. Like he’s shouting, except he knows he isn’t, because Gabriel isn’t flinching back, and Dean can’t hear _himself_ shouting. He doesn’t sound any different than normal, there’s just something wrong with his ears. He’s nervous, and it’s messing with him. “Actually, I was just going to walk down to the park. It’s not too far, and I was wondering if you…wanted to come with me.”

Gabriel stares at him.

“It’s a really nice day,” Dean tries. “For walking.”

“Walking in slacks and a button-down?” Gabriel asks slyly, and Dean glances down at his clothes, and says nothing. “And wouldn’t it be faster to drive to the park? You’ve got that beautiful car, why not show it off?” And then Gabriel laughs, and he reaches out and hooks his fingers into the front of Dean’s shirt. His hand is far, far warmer than Dean is used to. _Angels run hot,_ he thinks vaguely.

“I’m just fucking with you,” Gabriel says lightly. “If you really want company, I’ll come along.”

He steps out, then, and Gabriel is wearing jeans and a thin shirt, perfect for the breezy weather. His hair is swept back from his forehead, tucked behind his ears, and Dean has the urge to run his fingers through it, to muss it up. It shouldn’t be that neat, he thinks. Gabriel just isn’t that kind of person.

“I still haven’t been to most of the places around here,” Gabriel says softly. He’s looking up at the sky as they start down the road, as if keeping watch for something. One of his brothers, maybe. Dean wants to ask him if angels can really fly, if they have wings like garudas or like dragons, but he doesn’t want to sound ignorant, or too curious. Maybe Gabriel is tired of people asking him questions like that. “Usually when I go out, I go to…more familiar places.”

“Familiar?”

“Vegas is a favorite.”

“ _Ah_.” Dean considers that. “So you can do the whole…instant transportation thing?”

Gabriel stuffs his hands into his pockets, humming softly. “We can. Though we just call it ‘flying’. And yes, we do have wings. Though not anything you would recognize as such.”

Dean shrugs; was he so obvious? But Gabriel turns his head and looks at him, and he _smiles_.

“Relax, Deano. You’ve got questions, I get it. Everyone does.”

“I’m sure it’ll calm down in a few years.”

“A few years is a few years. This is now. Go ahead and ask.”

Dean watches the cars passing them by as they walk alongside the road, the rows of houses, the front yards, all neatly trimmed, kept to perfection. Living in an apartment means that Dean has never had occasion to take care of a lawn or a garden. He thinks he would probably be bad at it – plants confuse him. They’re alive, but you can’t hold them, or tell them they’re beautiful, or hug them when they’re scared. They aren’t like little brothers, or lovers, or friends. They aren’t even like _pets_.

“What do your wings look like?” he asks, and Gabriel tilts his head back and laughs. It’s not a nice laugh, but Dean doesn’t take offense. The sharpness of it isn’t directed at him, but at the sky, at the world in general.

“Like I said, you wouldn’t recognize them as wings. I could manifest them, of course, any way I want to. Feathers, scales, fur, skin, all of it’s an option. But, outside of this body? No, if you saw my wings…if you saw _me_ , your eyes would explode and your brain would boil in your skull.”

Dean swallows. “That’s…good to know.”

“It’s why we take vessels. It’s the only way we can walk amongst humans without wreaking havoc.”

“I’ve heard that some of the old Creators are like that,” Dean says. “They look like animals or trees because it’s the only way that humans can actually recognize them. Is that where you got the idea from?”

Gabriel tilts his head, smiling. “Well. Someone got the idea from _somewhere_.”

The rest of the walk is spent in silence that Dean wouldn’t exactly characterize as “companionable”, but it definitely isn’t uncomfortable. Dean gets the feeling that Gabriel’s quietness is more indicative of his feelings than anything else is. The space between them might not be uncomfortable, but Dean thinks that Gabriel _is_. He tries to keep at least a foot between them, just in case it’s proximity that’s making Gabriel so introspective.

The park, when they reach it, is almost empty. Dean’s only been here a few times, on dates, back before he gave up on the idea itself. He realizes that, for the first time in years, he actually _wanted_ to ask someone out – not just take them home and then show them the door in the morning. There’s something different about Gabriel. The timing of him moving in, the way he talks to Dean, the way he looks at him…it’s like Gabriel is focused on him, wholly, unwaveringly, and Dean’s never had that kind of…of non-judgmental scrutiny turned on him before. Gabriel watches him, and Dean doesn’t mind.

“Oh, hey, a swingset!” Gabriel exclaims, and he turns away from Dean’s side, heading straight for the children’s playground in the far corner of the park. There aren’t any kids here, today, but there are a handful of concerned-looking adults, who watch Gabriel and Dean with suspicion. They’ve never been here before – they don’t really belong.

Gabriel drops down into one of the swings, twisting the chains back and forth and peering up at Dean. “Have a seat,” he says, and Dean clears his throat, touches the back of his neck.

“Uh, I don’t think so.”

“Oh, _come on_. Don’t be a limp dick. Live a little, Dean. Fuck whatever it is other people say.” Gabriel kicks his feet out, begins to pump them in a motion that’s as familiar to Dean as breathing. He closes his eyes for an instant and remembers putting Sammy in one of those swings, the ones with the leg holes and the straps to hold in toddlers, and Sam crying out, _“Higher, Dean! Higher,”_ his tiny legs pumping furiously, but unable to get the swing going without a little push from his brother…

 _Had Sammy ever fallen?_ Dean gets the feeling that he had, that there had been blood, that he’d _seen_ it, but he doesn’t remember it. All he remembers is Sam on the swing, and then a few minutes later he had been…he’d been holding him, hadn’t he? And Sam had been staring up at him in awe as storm clouds gathered above them…

Dean blinks, light floods his vision, and Gabriel is staring at him. There are no storm clouds. Only Gabriel’s green, green eyes.

He clears his throat again. “All right,” he says, and then takes the swing next to Gabriel, uncomfortably aware of the fact that he’s too tall, and he can’t really sit in the thing without his feet digging in to the ground. But Gabriel grins at him, and some of that discomfort eases.

“We probably look like a couple of creeps,” he says.

“Fuck ‘em.” Gabriel’s voice is almost a snap, almost a _snarl_. Like the thought of someone insulting Dean angers him to the point of animal rage. “ _I_ don’t care what you look like. But then, that’s probably because I _am_ a creep.”

“You’re not as bad as all that,” Dean protests, and Gabriel glances at him, beginning to pick up momentum now. His feet leave the ground, and Dean considers the idea that this is like flying, for Gabriel, or else it’s as close as he can get, trapped as he is in his human vessel.

“You don’t know the first thing about me.” Gabriel sounds almost…smug? Like people not understanding him is a mark of pride, rather than a mark of loneliness. Sam used to sound like that, back when he was a teenager. Dean imagines _he_ sounded like that, too. Gabriel definitely isn’t a teenager, but maybe it’s different with angels. Maybe they only ever get close to their brothers and sisters…or maybe not even that. Dean has trouble figuring out what the relationship is between Gabriel and Castiel. Brothers, yes. Obviously. But before, he’d thought they might have been lovers, and now he’s thinking that Gabriel is more of a teacher than a friend. He’s never seen the two smiling together…well, he’s never seen Castiel smiling at _all_ , but he definitely doesn’t get the vibe that they’re friends.

Dean bites his lip, and then says, “But I’d like to,” and Gabriel’s head practically snaps around, eyes narrowed. “I mean…if that’s cool with you.”

There’s a pause, during which they do nothing but look at each other, Gabriel slowly coming to a halt and Dean having never moved in the first place, and Dean realizes all over again how bright Gabriel’s eyes are, how the green is lamplit and intense, and, in this light, almost _gold_. Dean’s never noticed that before, how the color changes depending on the light. His own eyes have only ever been straight-up moss green.

“Why did you ask me to come here with you?”

Dean clears his throat, and finally glances away. It’s not really how he wants to broach the subject, but any port in a storm, he guesses.

“Would you like to go out with me?” Gabriel stares at him. “ _To dinner_ ,” Dean amends, and almost scolds himself out loud, because he’d been _over_ that, earlier – what if dinner is too intimate? It’s been so fucking long since he’s done this that it’s like trying to remember a foreign language you haven’t taken since high school. “There’s a great Italian place not too far from here. I mean, we don’t have to go _now_ , obviously, but…sometime in the future? Maybe?”

Slowly, Gabriel starts to pump his legs again, sending him swinging up into the air, a patient arc. Dean watches out of the corner of his eye.

“You humans are always making things hard on yourselves, aren’t you?” Gabriel says the word “humans” on the tail end of a laugh, amused but not derisive. “Always assuming the worst. Or assuming the best when it’s obvious the best isn’t going to happen. The font of optimism and pessimism! _Now_ I remember why I posed as a god!” He suddenly extends his legs, dragging his heels through the dirt and coming to a jarring halt, and, as Dean watches, he twists the swing around and then reaches out, grabbing hold of the front of Dean’s shirt and pulling him forward. Dean leans with the tug, wincing softly – Gabriel is _strong_. Stronger than any human. And he smells like chocolate and peppermint; his eyes are almost completely gold. What happened to the green?

“ _You_ ,” Gabriel says, “are _so_ fucking precious.”

And then he leans forward and kisses Dean.

It’s so quick that Dean almost doesn’t register it, not until it’s almost over, and then it’s like his sense go into hyperdrive – he notices _everything_ , from the slight breeze that ruffles Gabriel’s hair, to how soft Gabriel’s lips are (not chapped, like Castiel’s always look – does Gabriel use chapstick?), to how he keeps his eyes open as he kisses, to how the smell of candy and peppermint gets stronger, like it’s being put through an oven. And Gabriel is so _hot_. Not just in the sense of him being attractive (and even there, Dean has the feeling that people will disagree with him), but in the sense of actual, physical warmth. Gabriel is close enough that Dean can feel how his body is radiating heat like a tanning lamp. He has to be at _least_ a degree or two warmer than Dean is.

And then it’s over, it only lasted a few seconds in the first place, and Gabriel leans back, licking his lips and humming softly. Dean’s mouth feels like it’s vibrating, like someone just ran an electric current through his teeth and tongue and lips. He opens his mouth to say something, but nothing comes out.

“If you wanted to ask me to be your _special friend_ , you should have just said so,” Gabriel says smugly. Dean closes his mouth, considering that. He gets the feeling that Gabriel is…intentionally misunderstanding him? Because, in Dean’s head, “special friend” implies a relationship that’s more friends-with-benefits than dinner-and-a-movie. And Dean _definitely_ said “dinner”, not “nightcap”.

Maybe this is Gabriel just being _Gabriel_ though, so Dean doesn’t mention it, only swallows and then says, “So that’s a ‘yes’ to dinner, then?”

Gabriel tilts his head, a birdlike gesture that Dean has seen garudas make before – he’d had no idea it applied to other beings, too, but apparently angels, for all that they wear the skin of humans, are avian enough to adopt some of the same mannerisms.

Dean finds it oddly endearing.

“Dinner it is,” Gabriel says. “Of course, if you wanted to go out to a club or a bar, I wouldn’t object to that, either. You seem more of a bar type.” Dean shrugs; that would have been true of him a month or two ago, but now…And Gabriel smiles at him, like he understands. “All that false bravado just _vanishes_ when your brother is gone, doesn’t it?”

“I might have just asked you out to dinner, but I _will_ punch you in the mouth,” Dean warns, almost entirely sure that Gabriel, with all his strangeness, will not be offended. Sure enough, he gets neither a glare nor a frown, but rather a wider smile.

“How is your brother, anyways? Still far, far away from here?”

“Still in college, if that’s what you mean.” Dean crosses his arms over his chest, shrugging slightly. “He probably won’t be coming back here until November. That’s when the first break is. Maybe not even then…he’s met some girl. He’s staying with her while he finds his own apartment.”

“I doubt he’ll go so far as that. I’d rather live for free with an attractive woman than pay for an apartment that will be empty when I come home to it. But what do I know?”

“You know a lot,” Dean says. “Unless you were lying about posing as a god.”

“Clever human. I know more than most angels, that’s for sure. But I’ve always thought like a Trickster, not like any ordinary god. Which I’m assuming your brother is.”

Dean laughs. “You shouldn’t be asking me that. I’ve always thought he was pretty weird.”

“You’ve always thought he was weird? Or…you’ve always thought that _you_ were weird?”

Dean folds his arms a little tighter over his chest, glancing away. “I don’t really talk about that.”

“Maybe you should.”

“And maybe _you_ should stop trying to psychoanalyze me.”

“You make it too easy.” Dean shakes his head in disbelief, twisting the swing away from Gabriel, but he can still feel Gabriel staring at him, a weight against his shoulders.

“Still want to spend time with me?” Gabriel asks softly. “Still want to get to know me? Because I’ll tell you right now, Dean, this is me at my kindest. It only gets worse from here.”

Dean snorts. “Are you trying to scare me off?”

“Think of it as a friendly warning. Neighborly concern, if you will. I am not a nice creature, Dean. You’re holding my interest for now, but I don’t know if that will last, or what will happen if it ends.”

“ _If_ it ends,” Dean repeats. “Now you’re just trying to cover your own ass. Who knows if it’ll end at all? I’m willing to…” He swallows. Stars, this is such a chick flick moment it isn’t even _funny_ , but he can’t think of any other way to _say_ it. “I’m willing to take a chance if you are.”

Dean doesn’t look back, but he _feels_. He feels the breeze, still going strong, mussing his hair. He feels the ground, solid under his feet, and he imagines that the dirt would be sun-warmed against his skin, if he happened to take his shoes off. He feels the warm metal of the swing’s chain digging into his arms.

He feels something touch his back, directly between his shoulder blades, and he knows that it isn’t a hand. It’s too warm to be anything human, too soft to be skin or bone. Dean doesn’t turn around to look – instead, he closes his eyes, because he has the idea that, somehow, if he looks back, something terrible will happen to him. Something _beautiful_ , yes, but terrible.

“You’re smarter than you look,” he hears, and it’s Gabriel’s voice but at the same time it isn’t, it’s something distant and powerful. It’s a voice that could never come from a human throat, a voice that would shred vocal cords and break bones. “You might want to keep your eyes closed.”

“Wasn’t planning on opening them,” Dean says. His voice is shaking. He shivers as he feels something brush against his neck, a soft touch, but he has trouble describing it. It’s hot, blazing hot, like touching a branding iron without suffering the pain, but it’s also soft and gentle. And no matter how Dean tries, he can’t think of a way to describe the softness – it isn’t like feathers, or velvet, or fine cotton. It isn’t really like anything. It’s soft without actually being there at all.

And then, as suddenly as that heat had come, it’s gone, and Dean lets out a breath like he’s just run a mile. Having that heat, that odd pressure against his back…it had felt like he was fifteen again, about to kiss a girl for the first time. Exhilarating and nerve-wracking.

“You’re a more interesting man than I gave you credit for, Dean Winchester. Don’t worry, that’s a good thing.”

 _For now,_ Dean hears, but he isn’t sure if it’s in his head or if it’s something borne on the wind. He opens his eyes, almost startled by the sudden brightness of the sun – shouldn’t there be an eclipse? Shouldn’t the sky be covered over with dark clouds? But when he turns around, there’s nothing there but Gabriel. The Gabriel _he_ knows, and not that alien thing, that presence, that _power_. This Gabriel is all sharp smiles and wavy brown hair and green-gold eyes. Dean feels himself relax, all in one breath, like a dam finally giving way.

“So,” he says, “dinner at six-thirty? Let’s say…next Thursday?”

Gabriel smiles, and as he does so a cloud passes over the sun, but Dean has no way of telling if the two are related.

~

Dean takes Gabriel to the little Italian place just down the street from his apartment. They walk there, and this time _both_ of them are wearing jeans and t-shirts. Gabriel doesn’t seem to mind that Dean prefers his Led Zeppelin shirt to something a little bit fancier, nor does he seem to mind when Dean orders beer, instead of wine.

Gabriel spends the first few minutes examining his menu, talking idly about how when he was still posing as a god, he’d lived in Italy for a time, and Americanized Italian food is _nothing_ compared to the real deal.

“I’ve only ever been through Canada before,” Dean says. “And even then, it was only a bit of Ontario. I don’t really know a lot about other places.”

“Remind me to take you sometime,” Gabriel says with a smile. “Anywhere you want. Spain, Italy, Russia…Berlin has some of the best nightclubs in all of Europe.”

“I was never really part of the club scene.”

“No, you weren’t, were you? You’re more the bar type. There’s plenty of beer in Germany, too.”

“Be careful,” Dean warns. “I might take you up on all that.”

“I’m looking forward to it.”

And then Gabriel orders a light beer from the menu, even though he’s probably perfectly capable of magicking himself up one of his own, and Dean is secretly relieved that he won’t have to try and fake his way through a bottle of wine. He doesn’t know the first thing about vintages or…or things like that. _Bouquets_ , he guesses.

And when it comes time for them to order food, Gabriel doesn’t go for the fancy stuff near the back of the menu, stuff that Dean’s never even considered as _food_ before, like the noodles made with squid ink sauce. No, Gabriel orders lasagna. Lasagna with four cheeses, and beer, and a side of bread sticks that they snack on while they’re waiting for their food.

Dean orders spaghetti. He never orders anything else. There’s something about it that reminds him of when he still took care of Sam, when dinner, for them, was a can of Spaghetti-O’s and, if they were lucky, some milk from the gas station down the street. If there _was_ a gas station. More often than not, there wasn’t one close enough for Dean to walk to.

They talk about everything. Nothing. Fucking cliché, but it’s true. Gabriel coaxes him into talking about things that Dean wouldn’t ordinarily talk about with a combination of sly humor and teasing insults. He tells “so a guy walks into a bar” jokes that inevitably end with a punchline that’s either bawdy or offensive, and Dean tries to one-up him with the dirtiest jokes he remembers hearing from the people his father hung out with, but Gabriel always comes out with something better, something funnier and even more lewd. Dean imagines it’s probably because he has a couple centuries’ worth of a head start.

Dean is fascinated by how _neat_ Gabriel is with his food. Not a single bit of sauce ends up anywhere other than the plate, and Gabriel never once has to use his napkin. It’s like he’s physically incapable of getting dirty, and Dean wonders if that’s a Gabriel thing or an _angel_ thing – or maybe even a combination of the two.

By the time they’re finished with dinner, Dean is pleasantly buzzed and Gabriel is leaning forward, the candlelight flickering over his face. It makes him look beautiful and vaguely sinister, and Dean is struck with a pang of _want_ so fierce that he hardly knows what to do with himself. He wants to lunge across the table and kiss Gabriel, kiss him until there’s no air left in his lungs, but Dean has the idea that that is probably the booze talking, at least _partially_ , and if he does that his shirt will probably catch fire and the night will end in tears.

But there’s also a part of him that no longer wants to be here. It’s a very small part, yes. But it’s there. And Dean isn’t sure where it comes from. He thinks he might still be worried that Gabriel isn’t being honest with him. He thinks he’s worried that Gabriel doesn’t _actually_ want to be here, that he’s just humoring the poor human.

“Gotta admit,” Gabriel says, “I never really put stock in the whole ‘going out’ thing. Why spend money on something I could just make for myself? But this is…different.” The way he says “different”…Dean thinks that Gabriel means to say “nice”, but there’s something holding him back. Still, Dean can hear the difference, and it lessens some of the tension in his shoulders. “So, thank you.”

“No problem.” Dean licks his lips; Gabriel follows the movement with his eyes, and Dean tries desperately to ignore the flush of warmth that rushes through him. “I was thinking we could do it again sometime.”

“I’d like that.” And Gabriel _smiles_. Not a smirk, not a grin, but a full-blown smile, and Dean is struck momentarily dumb by how bright it is, how wide and unassuming.

The candlelight flickers, and then flares a little bit brighter. Dean isn’t sure if it was a coincidence or not, but some stupid part of him insists that it happened because of Gabriel’s smile.

“Can I give you my cell number?” Dean asks, because he’s dazzled by the candle flame, because Gabriel’s eyes look gold here in the close dimness, because he _wants_.

“I don’t have a cell phone.”

“But you could if you wanted to.”

And Gabriel grins at him, and raises his hand and snaps his fingers, and suddenly he’s holding a sleek, green cell phone. Just like that. _Boom_.

“You know you didn’t have to,” Dean says, because it seems polite, because the manifestation laws might not apply to Gabriel yet but they will, someday, because at first it had seemed like Gabriel hadn’t wanted to, but now he’s looking down at the phone cradled in his palm and he’s smiling with his gold-green candlelight eyes, his pink mouth, his hair falling over his forehead.

“But I wanted to,” Gabriel murmurs, and Dean decides to leave it at that.


	6. Mourning

 

Dean gets the call on Tuesday.

He supposes that the call is an example of cosmic balance – a lot of people preach that sort of thing, these days. That for every shining beacon of good there has to be a deep well of evil, too. Every action has an opposite and equal reaction. That sort of thing. Dean’s never really paid attention to the patterns of good and bad in his life. He’s never marked them as happening first one, then the other. If anything, good and bad things tend to come in clusters, with him. He’ll have a good week, and then another good week, and then _boom_ , a bird shits on his truck. Or, you know, something like that. It’s never been this give and take before. This…this emphasis of duality, this extraction of a pound of flesh.

The call is made by a woman. Dean supposes that that’s clever, on the part of her employers – people take bad news better when it’s coming from a pretty lady, or at least a pretty- _sounding_ lady. It’s a sad fact of life, but it _is_ a fact.

“Hello, I’m calling for Dean or Sam Winchester.”

“Yeah, this is Dean. Who is this?”

“Hello Mr. Winchester, my name is Melanie and I’m with the Philadelphia police department…”

He has to drive for two and a half hours. Philadelphia traffic is in full swing, and Dean spends the entire time with his hands clutched like claws against the steering wheel, knuckles turning white, thinking, _what am I going to tell Sammy_. Melanie had been very, very adamant that there was no way to be sure, that that’s why they’re calling Dean down all the way from Penn’s Creek, but Dean _knows_. He doesn’t give his cell number out to just anyone.

The coroner’s office, when he gets there, is cold and sterile. Everything is either white or silver, and Dean resists the urge to flinch against the bright lights. The coroner is a short, balding man with a gap between his teeth. Dean tries not to stare, but there’s a part of him that would rather focus on something, _anything_ else, and well, this guy is just in the wrong place at the wrong time if he doesn’t want to feel self-conscious.

“Mr. Winchester,” the coroner says, and sticks out his hand – Dean ignores it.

“Just Dean.” _Mr. Winchester_ reminds him too much of…

His lips feel numb. Is that normal? The coroner slowly pulls back his hand.

“Well, ah, Dean. I’m terribly sorry to put you through this, but if you’ll just follow me…”

Dean follows the coroner back into a room that feels like it’s thirty degrees colder than any other place on the planet. Part of that, Dean is sure, is just his reaction to the…

 _Trauma_ , he thinks. _This is traumatic._ He watches the coroner cross the room to the row of metal compartments embedded in the far wall; each one is fitted with a heavy padlock, which the coroner opens with the quick twist of a key. Vampires and other undead aren’t exactly common around Penn’s Creek (Lenore is the only one that Dean is aware of), but this is a much larger city, with a much more diverse population. Sometimes, the padlocks become necessary – at least, until the new vampires and zombies are processed and then claimed by their makers.

But when the padlock _clicks_ , and the slab slides out, there’s no sudden rustle of cloth as the body rises up from the stillness of death, there’s no sudden inhalation as it comes back to life…there’s nothing but the coroner motioning for him to come closer. Dean takes a deep breath and inches towards the sheet-covered body. He doesn’t want to be here. Better that he live the rest of his life not knowing, that would be infinitely better, but…

“Are you ready?”

“Just do it,” Dean says, and the coroner blinks serenely at him, and then flips the sheet back.

And suddenly, “John Doe #27” becomes John Winchester, god, husband.

Father.

Dean closes his eyes. He’s going to be sick. He’s going to be…

“You need the trashcan, son?”

“Don’t call me that,” Dean grits out. Son. _Son_. He was never his father’s son, not in his father’s eyes – John Winchester loved him, loved them _both_ dearly, but he had never been able to move beyond Dean’s imperfection, and, eventually, he had allowed the idea of revenge to consume him. They had been soldiers, not sons. Beloved comrades. _Beloved_.

But, sometimes, being loved isn’t enough.

“Yeah,” Dean says. Everything feels off. His voice is too loud. His ears feel like he’s just surfaced from a great depth, like they’re about to pop. And yeah, he feels like he might puke, but he knows he can’t. “Yeah, that’s…that’s my dad.”

“I’m so sorry,” the coroner says. “The police are investigating his death…as I’m sure you know, gods don’t go down all that easily, so I don’t believe they’ve ruled out foul play. I imagine they’ll keep you informed.”

Dean doesn’t want to be informed, right now. He’s sure he will, later, when the anger sets in, but right now all he feels is…distant. _What will I tell Sammy?_

His phone buzzes. He doesn’t feel or hear it, the first time – it’s only when the coroner looks at him, and the surreptitiously glances at his pocket, that Dean realizes something is different. He hooks his phone out of his pocket and stares at the screen, not wanting to see the name that pops up. _Bobby Singer_.

Bobby Singer had been more of a father to him and Sam than John Winchester had ever been. He was human, so he’d never minded Dean’s failings, and he’d dealt with gods and monsters before, so he knew how to take care of Sam. When their father had wandered off, trying to find answers, reasons for their mother’s death, Bobby had been the one to take care of them. Dean distantly remembers Bobby attending his birthday parties, before…

Well. Before.

The phone buzzes one more time, and then falls silent. A moment later, it starts up all over again. Dean considers it, considers the likelihood of Bobby just continuing to call him, repeatedly, throughout the day, and determines that yeah, it’s pretty damn likely. He flips open the phone, holding it to his ear, but he doesn’t say anything. What’s the point? Bobby likely knew what happened hours, maybe even days before Dean knew.

“Dean? Skies above, boy, you forget how to pick up the damned phone?” Dean closes his eyes; he hears the coroner say something, something soft, maybe another “I’m sorry”, and then the sound of footsteps, leaving them room. When Dean opens his eyes again, he’s alone. “Dean, _talk_ to me!”

He swallows. “I’m here, Bobby.” Is he? Or is there some part of him that’s flung itself away from this place? The part of him that allows him to feel? “I…”

“ _Idiot_. You don’t have to say a word. I know.”

“I figured.”

“Look, boy, I know you must be going through a lot of pain right now, but there’s something you need to know.”

“Bobby,” Dean says quietly. “What the _fuck_ else is there for me to know? My father’s _dead_. I have to tell Sam, and he’s going to…he’s going to want to come back here because he’ll think that I need help. I don’t want him to waste another second of his life on dad. He’s already lost most of his childhood.”

“This isn’t the time for martyrdom, Dean. You need to _listen_.”

Dean turns away from the sheet-covered body, the glassy, wide-open eyes. It doesn’t even look like his father’s...Dean’s never seen a dead god before. Maybe this is normal. Maybe they’re _supposed_ to look like they might get up and walk away any minute. Dean isn’t sure he wants to know.

He knows that he never wants to see anything like this again.

“I’m listening,” he says, and hears the defeat in his voice, and _hates_ himself for it. He should be stronger than this. It’s not like he should have any particular loyalty to his father, after all. He was never anything but a disappointment. A well-kept secret. Something loved, but shameful.

And yet, there’s a part of him that has always desperately craved his father’s approval. For everything. For _anything_. And now all of his chances are just…gone.

“You need to tell your brother to get out of Penn’s Creek.” Bobby’s voice is too calm, too quiet. It’s the voice he used to use when their father came back to get them after a long week of hunting, except he’d been dripping blood, unable to heal himself for exhaustion or for some well-aimed curse, and Bobby had gently steered them into another room, his voice firm but soothing, _your dad just needs some time to rest, boys, now get on to bed and turn off all the lights. Dean, make sure your brother brushes his teeth._

“Bobby,” Dean says, “what’s going on?”

“I don’t know. Your father was on the trail of something, Dean, something big. He never stopped looking for that demon that killed your mother, and…I think he might have found it. Or gotten close enough to finding it that it got him killed.”

“You think this is murder, then.”

“I think that your father was in a dark place. I think he would have done anything to see that thing pay for what it did to Mary.”

“Why Sam? Is something…is this thing going to go after _him_ , too?” _The murders,_ he thinks. _The dead goddess, whole families slaughtered, none of them fully human._ Could a demon be doing that? A single demon?

Or is it something bigger?

“John didn’t tell me the fine details. Only that there was a pattern. He wasn’t the only one who lost a wife that year. Or a husband. All he told me was that he thought this thing was dealing with unfinished business.”

“You mean Sam,” Dean says. “You mean that it meant to kill Sam, too.”

“Maybe. Like I said, I don’t have the details. But if this thing is looking for Sam…”

“I get it.” Dean glances towards the door to the morgue. “Not many people know he’s gone off to college. He’s safer, there.”

“Sam’s gone?”

“Yeah.” Dean digs the heel of his palm against his temple, trying to stave off the headache he _knows_ he’s going to get. “He’s…doing good.”

“All the better, then. Tell him to stay where he is.”

“Bobby,” Dean says, and then licks his lips. His mouth feels unaccountably dry. “Did dad say anything about…this demon coming after me? Or anyone else?” He needed to know if he needed to get ready to defend himself. And if anyone else was in danger…Dean couldn’t just stand around and let them get hurt, he needed to _warn_ someone. He needed to tell the police or…

Or he needed to hunt this thing down himself.

There’s a long moment of silence. And then, “He said you were protected.”

The headache is growing. Dean can feel it. It pushes uncomfortably against the back of his right eye, and Dean isn’t sure he’ll be able to make the long drive back to Penn’s Creek without stopping to buy some Excedrin first.

“Protected,” he repeats. “What the fuck is that suppose to mean?”

“If you don’t know what ‘protection’ means then you’re beyond even my help, son.”

“ _Bobby_ ,” Dean snaps. “Tell me what dad _said_.”

He can picture, in his mind, Bobby sitting at his ancient kitchen table, the wood well worn, polished by years of curious hands touching it, scrawling on it with crayon (Sam), spilling things on it (Dean), and Bobby, grumbling, bringing out the cleaning rags and the wood polish and showing them how to clean up their own messes. Dean had learned how to take care of himself and Sam early on, but it had been Bobby who had shown him how to do it _properly_. How to _live_ , and not just exist.

Bobby is probably frowning. When he frowns, it’s like the front of a mountain collapsing – his brow furrows and his mouth pinches up, and Dean’s only ever seen that amount of care and experience in one other face before, and that face had been his father’s.

“He said that he’d taken care of it. That’d he’d send someone to keep an eye on things.”

“Give me a _name_!”

There’s a long pause. He thinks of Bobby, sitting at his kitchen table, with his head in one hand, and the sound of the dogs barking impatiently outside. Those dogs had barked at _everything_ , and there had been days when Dean had wished they would be quiet, but now he’s older, and the world seems quieter, and he sometimes wishes he could have that noise back, that comforting chatter.

The morgue is as silent as an empty church. He can’t even hear the traffic outside.

“Gabriel,” Bobby says. “He told me the guy’s name was Gabriel, but that was all.”

“Thanks, Bobby.” Dean reaches up, pressing the back of his hand to his mouth. His front teeth dig briefly into his skin, but he doesn’t let up on the pressure until he’s sure that he isn’t going to swear, or scream, or throw the phone across the room. And then he lowers his hand, and examines the row of marks he’s left behind. “I’ll call you when I get back to Penn’s Creek. I need to figure out how to tell Sam…”

“I understand. Dean, you sound… _off_. Are you going to be all right?”

“I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me, worry about finding a way to stop this thing.”

“Easier said than done.”

“Just _try_.”

Dean doesn’t wait for Bobby’s answer – he closes his phone, cutting off the call entirely, and then just holds it, thinking.

Thinking about Gabriel. Gabriel, who conveniently moved in across the street a single week before Sam went off to college. Who dropped by to see Dean. Who asked probing questions about Sam, where he was, how he was doing. Gabriel, who agreed to go with Dean to the park, but it had seemed like he was always holding a part of himself back. Keeping a part of himself secret.

Gabriel, who’s been _lying_ to Dean this whole time.

Dean reaches into his other pocket and touches the keys to his truck. His father is dead, and that means that the Impala, the last safe place of his almost nonexistent childhood, now belongs to him.

He flips his phone back open, and then dials the number that he now knows by heart. It’s the middle of the day, but he’ll keep trying.

The phone rings, and then goes to voicemail; Dean takes a deep breath as he walks out of the morgue, back out into the rest of the world’s incongruous warmth.

“Hey, Sammy,” he says. “I just heard from Bobby…You need to call me as soon as you get this. It’s about dad.”

~

If Dean had placed money on his predictions about Sam, he would be rich – Sam comes back from California, looking tired and drawn, but determined. His arms and legs shake when Dean goes to help him inside from the front lawn, but he hasn’t collapsed yet. Dean wonders when the grief will truly set in…or if it ever will at all. Sam never had the same relationship with their father that Dean had. Sam was never worried about impressing him…as much as their father had seen Dean as the disappointment, it had been _Sam_ who had wanted out first. Sam who had wanted to go to a single high school, Sam who had wanted a steady girlfriend in a single state, Sam who had wanted to go to college. If it’s grief that Sam feels, it will be grief for the loss of an idea – the father that they never had, but always wanted.

Dean is mourning more than an idea. He’s mourning a man that he failed to ever impress.

Sam isn’t alone, when Dean goes to bring him inside. Standing next to him, very close and holding on to his arm, is a petit blonde girl. Dean stares at her, then glances at Sam.

“This is Jessica,” Sam says. “She’s my…” He takes a deep breath, and then seems to pull himself up. The shaking doesn’t stop, but it suddenly seems less important. “She’s my girlfriend.”

“I’m sorry we have to meet like this,” Jessica says earnestly. “Sam’s told me a lot about you. I wanted to come with him and just…” She gestures, almost helplessly, and Dean understands even if he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to think that they’ve become that pitiful, that they invite, without asking, the automatic sympathy of total strangers. But the world is the way the world is. Dean takes hold of one of Sam’s arms, and he helps his brother inside - with Jessica trying valiantly to support Sam’s other half – and then he makes them both some coffee.

It’s three in the afternoon, but he figures that a caffeine boost might be necessary anyways. He knows _he_ didn’t sleep last night. Not after he told Sam.

That night, Jessica offers to sleep on the couch in the living room, and Sam automatically tells her she doesn’t need to. That she can sleep with him, in his bed, and it’ll be a tight fit but they can manage it, and all of a sudden Dean realizes that his little brother has grown up. There was no single, life-changing event that led to Sam becoming a man, a _god_ , instead of an awkward little brother. Dean would know about it, if there was – it must have been something small, or a series of things. It must have been quiet and not all that sudden. The Sam that Dean remembers from their childhoods would have blushed strawberry red and looked away if a girl had gotten close enough to him. He would never have been able to work up the courage to ask a girl like Jessica to sleep in the same bed as him…and yet here they are.

Something has changed, and Dean has the sinking feeling that he’s expected to change with it, but that he’s falling behind. He can’t keep up.

They don’t bury their father. John Winchester, who spent much of his life hunting things that crawled out of graves and terrorized humans, wouldn’t have wanted to end up the same way. Gods are strange, fickle things when it comes to death – sometimes it sticks, and sometimes it doesn’t, but when it doesn’t the thing that comes back is never precisely the person who actually died. Instead, they hire a crematorium, a man in overalls with a miniature dragon named “Joe”, who explains to them the process of cremation by dragonfire. There won’t be anything left – no scraps of bone, no teeth, no scattered pieces of godliness. Not a single thing.

They’re allowed – all three of them – to sit in on the cremation. The dragon’s owner chalks a series of protective sigils around three chairs, and Dean, Sam, and Jessica watch the last remnants of John Winchester go up in flames. Dean imagines that he can _feel_ his father’s body disintegrating – it’s like walking into a room for twenty-seven years, seeing all the same things you’re used to seeing, and then one day you walk in and something is missing. Not anything large, like a couch or a television, but something small and personal, and you notice the lack of its presence before you ever actually notice the lack of the thing itself. Whatever it was that had made their father who he was, the god he was, it’s gone now, and Dean shivers as he feels it leave. When he turns to look at Sam, his brother has his eyes closed, and there are tears streaming down his cheeks. When the tears fall to the floor they freeze, looking like someone has scattered tiny glass beads all around their feet.

Jessica doesn’t say anything. She only holds Sam’s hand.

“Dean,” Sam says. His voice is thick with grief. “What happened? You said that Bobby called you.”

 _Bobby called me and told me that there’s a demon coming to kill you,_ Dean thinks numbly. _He told me to keep you away, and now you’re here, and if I tell you the truth you’ll want to stay and kill this thing yourself._ So he can’t tell Sam. He can’t tell Jessica, either – Jessica, as far as he knows, is only human, and she doesn’t deserve to get involved in all of this.

Dean resists the urge to look away as he lies. “Dad got into a fight.” He swallows, and then says, “With a demon.” There. That’s _almost_ the truth. And Sam might ask what demon, where, why, but Dean doesn’t have to tell him that their father was right all along. That a demon killed their mother. That now it’s coming after Sam.

“Not the demon that he was…?” Sam sounds worried. Almost panicked, actually. Dean quickly shakes his head, but he doesn’t look directly at either Jessica or Sam when he does so. Jessica is staring at him. He wonders if she’s any better at catching people in a lie than Sam is. They’ve always needed to be able to lie, sort of by necessity, and learning to tell when someone _else_ was lying just sort of happened naturally. But Sam’s expression is pained, distracted, and after a moment he makes a soft sound, an acknowledging sound, but he doesn’t say anything else.

Dean clears his throat, not wanting the silence to drag on. It makes him uncomfortable. It makes him feel as if they really are the only ones in this tiny, too-hot room. “Come on, Sammy,” he says, and puts his hand on his little brother’s shoulder. Sam is shaking, and Dean isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do, so he just holds on a little bit tighter. Jessica seems to have a better idea of how to handle it – she leans up, and presses a kiss to the curve of Sam’s jaw. Slowly, slowly, the shaking stops, and Dean says, “We can get a hotel, and you can rest. I called off work for a few days, Rufus understands, so I can stay with you until you go back.”

Sam reaches up, wiping the tears from his cheeks. Frost covers his fingers, and as Dean gently starts to guide him from the room, he hears Jessica murmur, “Thank you.”

~

Sam needs three days to recover enough that he feels comfortable heading back to California on his own.

He doesn’t want to go. It’s understandable, and Dean says as much, but Sam can’t stay, either. School isn’t like a job, he can’t just take a few days, a week, a _month_ off, not the way that Dean can. If Dean loses his job, well, he can always go and find another one. If Sam fails out of college, getting back in isn’t so easy as that.

“I don’t want to go,” Sam says, late one night, and Dean is sleeping in the room’s other bed, so he hears Jessica make a soft, shushing sound, and then he hears them kiss, and Sam finally sleeps. Dean turns over in his freezing bed and considers something that Gabriel told him, that angels are precisely three-point-thirty-three degrees hotter than the average human, so they constantly feel like they’re running a high fever. He touches the small space beside him and wonders if it would feel any warmer if Gabriel were there, but when he tries to conjure up the fantasy he draws a blank. He reaches for it, but his mind grasps at nothing, and he drifts off to the sound of Sam crying in his sleep, and Jessica’s soft, soothing noises, and his dreams are uneasy, and he doesn’t remember any of their details. When he wakes, he only remembers that they were terrible, and that he had been trapped with them, unable to change a thing.

Sam hugs him, before he goes back to California. Jessica stands by and watches, and smiles sadly, but Dean can tell that she doesn’t realize how rare an occasion this is. Winchesters don’t hug. The only time they’ve ever expressed their affection physically has been after life-or-death situations, times when one or both of them had almost died. Even considering their previous lifestyle, that hadn’t happened all that often, so when Sam puts his arms around Dean’s shoulders he’s initially surprised, and then confused. And then Dean remembers that Sam doesn’t need this waiting period, this time to gather himself and his anger, this not-feeling time. But once he remembers that he understands, and he tentatively hugs Sam back.

“Call me,” Sam murmurs. “Every day. Tell me how you’re doing.”

“I’m fine.” But Dean can hear the lie in his own voice, like he’d spent all his persuasiveness on convincing Sam to go back to California, back to college and Jessica and his own life. He doesn’t even believe himself, even though, for now, it’s almost true. He’s fine…but in a few days, a week, he won’t be. The realization will set in and there will be nothing left to be but angry.

Still, he says, “I’ll call,” and Sam smiles at him. His eyes are red, and his cheeks are covered in hoarfrost. Dean halfheartedly licks his thumb and then reaches up to clean the trails of ice away; Sam bats at his arm, making a sound that could be a laugh, but it could be a sob, too. Dean has no way of telling. Things have changed so much, and in such a short amount of time.

“It was good to meet you Jessica,” he says, partly because it’s true, and she seems like a nice girl, but also partly because he thinks that if this touchy-feely crap goes on for any longer he might lose his testicles entirely. Jessica smiles at him, like she knows what he’s doing but she’s going along with it anyways, and Sam finally takes a step back.

“It was good to meet you too. I just wish it could have happened…” She trails off, but Dean hears what she doesn’t say - _under better circumstances_. At a time when death wasn’t hanging over them like a storm cloud, or a flickering light fixture about to come crashing down.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.”

“I’ll come back as soon as break starts,” Sam says, and Dean glances at him, biting his lip.

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I know, but I want to make sure that you’re…”

“ _Sam_ ,” Dean snaps, and the sudden harshness of his voice halts Sam in the middle of his sentence. He stares as Dean takes a deep breath, and then another. _He has to stay in California_. “I don’t need your help to _cope_. I’m fine. And I’ll still be fine when Thanksgiving comes around. And Christmas, and New Years, and every break you get after that. I promise, Sam.” Another deep breath. “And besides, you and Jessica should…spend some time together.”

“I live with her, Dean, we spend practically _all_ our time together.”

“I mean…quality time. Holidays. You know.”

“Sam,” Jessica says, “if he says you don’t have to come back here for the holidays…”

“Don’t have to?” Sam asks. “Or he doesn’t want me to?”

“Don’t start, Sammy. This isn’t the time.”

Sam takes a long, slow breath, and then lets it all go at once, explosively. The clouds overhead scud wildly across the sky, swirling together in meaningless patterns. It’s too fast to be natural, and when Sam breathes out again the movement stops.

“Okay,” he says softly. “Okay, I think I get it.”

Sam doesn’t. If he’s lucky, he never will, but Dean is perfectly willing to let him make this assumption, just this once. It will be better for the both of them if Sam just…never knows.

“You should probably be heading back,” Dean says. “Don’t want to miss any more classes.”

“The classes aren’t important, Dean.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it.”

“Sam,” Jessica says. “Let’s just go. I think you both need some time to…to do your grieving in private.”

“You always attract the smart ones,” Dean says softly. He tries to smile, but it feels forced. He has to settle for Sam realizing that it’s a joke.

“That’s because I don’t find my girlfriends in strip clubs,” Sam answers, and he’s the one who can smile, even though he’s been crying, and stars, but that smile is going to break Dean’s heart one day. “I’ve missed you, Dean. I promise I’ll come back, when the school year is over.”

“I’ll hold you to that.” This, all of this, it’ll be over by then, right?

Right?

Dean gives Jessica a hug before she and Sam leave. She smells like some kind of strong, fruity shampoo, and a year ago Dean would have liked that, would have liked that powerfully _female_ smell. But now all he can think is that he’d prefer chocolate and peppermint, and whenever he thinks that something in his chest tightens with hurt and anger and betrayal.

By the time that Jessica and Sam leave, ‘porting their way back to sunny California, Dean’s made up his mind on how he’s going to handle his pain-clenched heart.

~

It took him almost an entire day to drive to Philadelphia in the first place. The drive back takes Dean only half that time – there’s no traffic worth speaking of, which is unusual, and the weather stays clear, which, for Pennsylvania in the early onset of winter, is more than unusual, it’s almost _suspicious_. But it means that he gets back to Penn’s Creek before nightfall, so Dean tries not to think too hard about it. He’s tired, and he’s numb, and he wants nothing more than to fall into bed and forget everything that’s happened.

He gets two text messages before he falls asleep – one is from Ash, reading, _Where were you?_ It’s followed by a frowning face, and Dean snorts and sends back,

 _Dad died. Sam came in from Palo Alto so we could have the body cremated. Long week._

The second text is from Bobby – and Dean is honestly surprised that Bobby has a phone that actually _can_ text, let alone that he knows how to do it. The message is short, simple, beautiful and painful and the same time. Dean has to ball up his hand and press his fist against his eye in order to try and stave off a sudden, unexpected wave of sadness.

 _Your dad left the Impala to you,_ it says, and Dean falls asleep with the phone clutched in one hand, his other arm tossed over his eyes to block out the light. He never even makes it to his bed.

But he dreams.

 _”Everything will get better,” Sammy says, and he’s seven and Dean is sitting on the edge of a motel bed, cradling his head in his hands and hating himself, hating himself with such vehemence and fervor that he thinks he must have done something awful – has he ruined Sam’s life by telling him about their father’s death? Is it because he came back to Pennsylvania? But when Dean looks down at himself he’s wearing Batman tennis shoes and a shirt that says “Led Zeppelin”, but it’s too small. At least, he thinks it should be too small, but when he looks up he catches sight of his reflection in the motel’s television, and he’s almost twelve. He’s almost twelve, and he remembers that last night his voice broke for the first time._

 _He opens his mouth to ask Sammy what’s happening, why he’s here, but what comes out is, “What if I can’t help you? What if I can’t make it happen?”_

 _And Sammy says, “You can. You can help me. I swear.”_

 _“You’re too young to swear.”_

 _“I’m not, Dean, you can help me, you can.”_

 _Help him with what? How? Dean is confused. His ankle hurts and he’s so, so confused – he reaches down to touch his foot and his fingers come away stinging, like he just touched a nettle or maybe like he tried to hold a thumb tack and didn’t do it properly. His foot hurts, and now so does his hand, and Sam keeps talking but Dean can’t, he doesn’t remember –_

…Dean was utterly certain that the monster was in the bushes just outside their hotel room window, but he wasn’t sure what it was or how to kill it, because his father was the god, his brother was the god, he was just a knobby-kneed human wearing a leather jacket too big for his shoulders, still smelling of his father’s aftershave. He was still smooth and high-voiced and he was certain that the monster would rush in and kill them both, because Sammy was only five and Dean had to protect him, had to, there was no choice in the matter. Just blind, animal instinct.

So when the monster started to throw itself against the locked door, and the wood started to splinter under its weight, Dean had jammed his shoulder against the doorknob and held it there, his feet scooting across the carpet with each savage shove, and the door hadn’t been made of solid oak or anything strong like that, it had been a cheap, pulped-wood door, but somehow it had held against his shoulder, and he’d gotten splinters in his hair and under the skin of his cheeks, but it had held.

And afterwards Sammy had looked up at him, and he’d said…

 _“I swear you can help me,” Sammy says, and then the television turns on, and it’s a picture of an explosion. It’s Apocalypse Now, and Dean knows it because it’s his father’s favorite movie, because he loves the smell of napalm in the morning, because there’s something at the door, some horrible thing throwing itself against the door and Dean’s voice is cracking, he can’t help, he can’t…_

Dean opens his eyes. He has a headache that could kill an elephant and his mouth tastes like cotton, but it’s not a bad taste – just fuzzy and listless and _there_. Dean rolls over, and he almost falls because he’s forgotten that he fell asleep on the couch. Something tumbles out of his hand, a suddenly noticeable lack of weight, and Dean looks down at his cell phone, lying screen-up on the floor.

 _1 new message_ , it says. Dean groans, extends his arm as far as he can and manages to snag the phone up off the floor. He holds it against his stomach, flipping it open and squinting at the screen. There’s no number – just a blinking “withheld” message, and then the text itself.

 _You free Saturday?_

 _\- Gabriel_

Dean closes his eyes, and swallows thickly. It feels like his throat is lined with razors; he doesn’t want to breathe for fear that it will dislodge something and send it hurtling down towards his heart.

He lets the phone slip out of his fingers and drop, once again, to the floor.

He wants to go over there right now, to fling himself across the street and pound on Gabriel’s door, wants to demand _what’s happening_ and _why are you here_ and _did I ever actually have a chance, or were you just being polite_. But Saturday isn’t that far away. He can wait that long. If it means that when Sam comes back no one will look at him and say, “that’s the one with the crazy brother”, then he can wait that long.

~

He manages to wait until Friday.

It’s the weekend, he thinks. The weekend is so close, and yet it seems so far away, and Dean goes to work, he puts on his hard hat and his vest and he talks to Ash, but he can’t talk about what’s actually _happening_.

When Ash asks him what happened, is he okay, doesn’t he need to take some time off work or something, Dean only shakes his head, and is totally unable to explain the spreading coldness in the center of his chest. Yes, his father is dead. No, he doesn’t need to talk about it.

“What about that person you ditched me and Fred for? The one you might have had a date with? Are you talking to them?”

Dean doesn’t answer. After a few minutes of silence, Ash seems to get the hint, and he doesn’t bring it up again.

Friday night. That’s how long he manages to wait. He gets off of work at six, and he goes home, and he opens his fridge and he looks at how empty it is. Nothing but beer and half a quesadilla from Taco Bell. His whole apartment is empty, and, before he even realizes what he’s doing, Dean is pulling on his jacket and marching out of his apartment, down the stairs and out into the cool evening air. Everything smells like ozone and falling leaves, but that isn’t right, is it? That’s not how the air is supposed to smell.

He raises his fist, and there is Gabriel’s door – when did it get there? Did it move, somehow? Dean is almost positive that he wasn’t moving _that_ fast. But the wood is solid under his hand when he knocks, and then knocks again, and suddenly his hand hurts and he realizes that he isn’t knock, but _pounding_ , slamming his hand in great, swinging arcs against the door. His face feels numb, and he slumps against the house, next to the door, hating himself for not being able to keep it together, for condemning Sam to a life of _that’s him, with the crazy brother_.

His cheeks feel numb – he reaches up to touch them, and wipes away tears that have long since cooled. How long has he been crying, then? He can’t even tell.

There’s a noise, off to the side, and at first Dean doesn’t recognize it for what it is. But then he tilts his head up, almost as if he’s been searching for this magic angle all his life, and he sees Gabriel, standing there in the open doorway. He’s wearing a green t-shirt that’s loose in the shoulders and stomach, like he has something to hide, and his feet are bare and delicate and stupidly pale. His eyes are too wide and too somber and too, too green.

Dean balls up his fist and punches him.

It’s a weak punch – he could do better, but he doesn’t want to. He makes a soft, startled noise, a breathless cough like a muted gunshot, and he realizes that his hand hurts, and his knuckles are bleeding from where he was slamming them against the door, and that he’s left a curve of red on Gabriel’s cheek, in an almost perfect imprint of the shape of his fist. Gabriel’s head doesn’t snap back – it’s like punching a brick wall. It hurts more than it should, but it also makes Dean feel better than it should.

Gabriel’s eyes are no longer green, but gold. He stares steadily at Dean, at his bloodied knuckles, at his numb cheeks and the dark circles under his eyes, and then he takes a step off to the side, and Dean drifts into the house like a worried ghost.

“I trust you’ve gotten it all out of your system,” Gabriel says, and Dean turns slowly in a circle, just _looking_ at the house, at the carefully arranged furniture, at the pictures and the decorations. Nothing has moved. Not even the books on the coffee table. It’s like no one actually lives here, like it’s meant to be an empty house. Deserted. Dean reaches down and nudges a book on the Dalai Lama out of place, letting it rest slightly askew in the middle of the living room table. It doesn’t help. The place still looks empty.

“Not really,” Dean says, and hears the truth in his own voice, but recognizes that it’s hollow. There’s nothing more he can do to wring this hurt out of himself.

“Well.” Gabriel brushes past him, heading, not for the chairs or the couch, but for the kitchen, which Dean has glimpsed before, but never actually been in. When he steps into it, the first thing he notices is how _white_ it all is – Dean knows from experience that even previously white kitchens don’t stay that clean for long. People spill food, and cooking leaves behind a mess, and people are always walking on the tiles in their shoes. Everything turns a sort of off-cream color after a while.

The fact that this kitchen is still fucking _sparkling_ clean is another indication as to how much this house is actually used.

Gabriel pulls open the freakishly clean refrigerator and pulls out two beers. _Sam Adams’ Black Lager_ , the labels say. Gabriel holds one out, but Dean doesn’t take it, and after a moment the angel nods, and then sets the bottle on the counter.

“You know why I’m here.” Dean is guessing. Maybe Gabriel _doesn’t_ know, maybe he doesn’t realize yet, but the fact of the matter is that Dean is still more willing to trust his father than anyone else. He turns away when Gabriel doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even blink – it’s like looking at a statue. He can’t stand it. Gabriel is supposed to be the animated one, with the laugh lines at the corners of his eyes and the slow, sly grin. This isn’t Gabriel, who joined him for dinner at a small Italian restaurant and told him dirty jokes until his sides ached with laughter. This isn’t Gabriel, who tried to give him a big-screen TV and a leather couch on their first meeting. This certainly isn’t Gabriel, who typed Dean’s number into his new cell phone with a wink and nod.

This is an archangel.

“I do,” Gabriel says easily.

“You know what happened to my father.”

“I know a lot of things.”

Dean clenches his fists; his palms hurt, and he thinks that he’s still bleeding. He looks down, just to be sure – his knuckles are dripping blood onto the perfectly white kitchen floor.

“All of this was because of me.”

“Well, technically all of this was for your brother.”

Gabriel tilts his head. He looks so much like a startled bird that Dean wants to laugh, but Gabriel’s eyes are still gold, and he thinks that would be a bad idea. Besides, he doesn’t think it would come out as real laughter – it would be something high-pitched and lonely, and angry. It would be something vicious rather than humorous.

“Was that why you agreed to go out with me?” Dean demands, and Gabriel’s shoulders hunch down, and he can hear something, in the distance, like the rush of blood or the beating of wings. “Did you want to get closer to _Sam_? Did you want me to tell you where you could find him? What the _fuck_ , Gabriel! I thought…”

Dean trails off, unwilling to finish his sentence. He’d thought that there had been…something. That maybe he should try this whole dating thing out again. That maybe it didn’t matter that he was human, _just this once_.

Gabriel is looking at him so seriously. Almost sad. But maybe that’s just Dean trying to humanize something that isn’t human. Trying to understand something that’s beyond him. He’s been doing that his whole life – why not now, too?

“You don’t understand,” Gabriel says, and he reaches out, as if trying to touch Dean, like he’s trying to lay a hand on Dean’s shoulder. Like he’s trying to be _comforting_. Dean takes a step back.

“No, I _don’t_. So why don’t you explain it to me, huh? Explain why you led me on. What this demon has to do with my family. Why you’re _here_ , since you’re obviously not here for _me_.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.”

“Then _prove_ it!”

“Castiel is gone.”

Dean’s brain grinds to a halt, pausing a moment and then starting up again, backpedaling towards confusion and incredulity. “What?”

“I said ‘Castiel’s gone’. He left yesterday morning. In a week or so he’ll be officially transferred to California, so he can keep an eye on Sam.” Gabriel glances away – Dean isn’t sure, but he thinks some of the gold might be leaving Gabriel’s eyes, draining away. He isn’t sure what that means. “Zachariah came, and told us that there was no reason to stay. That you aren’t in any danger. He’s done that a few times, now.”

“That’s what you were talking about? _Us_? This whole time?”

“It’s not as bad as it sounds. We were sent to protect you.”

“Yeah, without _telling_ us.”

“It was for your own good. If we’d told you, you would have reacted like _this_.”

“Just…just shut up.” Dean raises his hand, curls his fingers in his hair and digs his nails into his scalp. The quick, sharp pain doesn’t help him to regain control, and his hand hurts but it’s a dull, aching hurt, and it feels like his skin is too tight for his soul. Like there’s some rabid animal curled up, waiting, in the safe confines of his ribcage.

“Why aren’t you gone, too?” His voice feels muffled, even though he knows that it isn’t, that it shouldn’t be. This, he thinks, this might ruin _everything_. Because there’s still a part of him that’s saying that Gabriel isn’t here for him, Gabriel is here because he needs to get more information on Sam, because he just hasn’t been _transferred_ yet, because…

“Because I wanted to stay.”

Dean swallows. “And my father?”

“We talked. Briefly, before Castiel and I were assigned to your brother. I promised him that I would take care of his boys.”

“Then go to California,” Dean says. “If my father’s the only reason you’re here…if Sam needs you more than me, just _go_. This was all fake anyways, all you wanted was to _use_ me to - ”

“ _No_!” Gabriel snaps – stars, it doesn’t even sound human, it sounds like an animal, like a wolf’s snarl, and Dean takes another step back, suddenly _afraid_ , and…and…

 _He closes his eyes and he dreams of Sam, Sam jumping off a truck and soaring gracefully through the air, Sam falling from a great height and always having someone to catch him, Sam huddling in the motel’s closet while the rain pours down outside, cold rain like the tears on Sam’s cheeks, and a monster that is larger than both of them tries to get inside while their father is away, Sam whimpering because of the noise and Dean setting his shoulder to the door and _pushing_ …_

And now he’s here in Pennsylvania while another monster, a smaller, smarter monster, is trying to get through the door, trying to shove itself into the college life where Sam has hidden himself for the time, and Dean is here and he can’t do a single thing to help, because he’s human and because Sam is so very far away.

There’s a sound, like the rattle of glassware against a countertop, and Dean glances to the right just in time to see one of the kitchen cupboards fly open, like an invisible hand had wrenched it apart and now was picking up glasses, and ceramic plates, and fuck, they were _hovering_ there. And then, just as suddenly, they _weren’t_ , they were flying of their own accord towards the opposite wall, and Gabriel was just _standing_ there, intense and sad and…and _shocked_ while glass shards scattered across the floor around his feet, and pieces of ceramic fell upon his shoulders.

Dean feels like he can’t breathe, like something has settled on his chest and is trying to press all of the air out of him, and his foot _hurts_. Not like stubbed-his-toe hurt, but the kind of deep hurt you feel when you injure yourself with a piece of heavy machinery, when you can see the blood bubbling out of you like your body is an oil well and you _know_ that it won’t end well for you, it can’t possibly, not when the ragged edges of your wound look like a split in the Earth itself.

And the sound is horrible. He’s always hated the sound of breaking glass. The windows had shattered from the heat; he remembers that. The windows had shattered and he had run through the yard, and something had touched his foot, some superheated piece of glass, and…

And it _hurts_ , it hurts so _much_ , and Dean tries to shift his weight to the other foot, because maybe that will make it a little easier to bear, maybe, except it doesn’t, it’s like the pain isn’t coming from some outside source, but like a part of his body is rebelling against the rest of him. He can’t help himself – he makes a low, animal noise of pain, and he doesn’t even see Gabriel move, he’s that _fast_. One minute Dean is standing there, trying not to collapse in pain, and the next he’s weightless, and Gabriel is pressed up against him like a support wall. He’s so warm.

“Leave the fuck off,” Dean mumbles. His voice is slurred, and it takes him a moment to realize that it’s with _pain_. It really _does_ hurt that bad.

“No.” He feels a soft mouth press against the curve of his temple, and then Gabriel says, “You know, we suspected, once. But we were never sure, and eventually we forgot. Now I see. There’s something… _covering_ you.”

“Get off of me.” His voice comes out rough, almost a growl, but he finds it difficult to maintain his anger. It _hurts_. He isn’t even sure he knows what _it_ is, anymore.

“Let me tell you the whole story,” Gabriel says. “I stayed here for _you_. I swear it.”

“Promises.”

“Ones I plan to honor. I might be an asshole, Dean, but I keep my word.”

Dean closes his eyes. His head is swimming, and he feels weightless, like he’s in one of those Discovery Channel documentaries about astronauts learning how to function in zero gravity. He feels himself moving, but he knows that _he_ isn’t doing it.

“You fucker,” he mutters, making the realization just before another wave of pain rolls over him, burying him beneath a flash of red and black. “Stop _carrying_ me.”

And then there’s nothing. Nothing at all. No pain. No weightlessness. No warmth. Just a vast and undisturbed sensation of nothing.


	7. Confrontation

 

Dean claws his way back towards _something_ , towards light and pressure and sensation, and the first thing that he hears is Gabriel yelling.

 _It’s not _full-on_ yelling, not like the screaming fights he used to get into with his father (he’s surprised by how much just the _thought_ hurts, he’s surprised that the numbness is starting to wear off so soon, and he’s surprised by the fact that it isn’t anger left in its place, but sorrow). It’s a low and huddled sound, but there’s no mistaking the fury in Gabriel’s voice. There’s a low snarl caught in the tightness of Gabriel’s throat, like he’s forcing himself to be civil._

“Face it, Zachariah, you fucked up. You weren’t _there_. Did you honestly think that no one would ever find out? Seals like that _fade_ , dumbass, they don’t last _forever_. What were you planning to do? On the day he noticed he’d stopped aging, what, were you just going to say ‘my bad’ and leave it at that? You _idiot_.”

A pause, and then, “That’s _bullshit_. _You_ were assigned to this family, _you_ were supposed to be keeping an eye on them. And because of you… _No_ , I’m not happy about it. Do I sound fucking happy to you? I’m pissed that _my_ human is suffering because _you_ wanted an easy way out, and…”

Wait.

 _His_ human?

Dean opens his eyes.

He’s lying on a bed, flat on his back, with his arms tucked neatly against his sides and his legs spread wide enough that, for a moment, he considers the possibility that maybe this is all a bad dream, and he’s just come home from a long night of drinking and he’s going to look down and there’ll be body crouched between his legs, and they’ll look up and they’ll have their hair tucked behind their ears and eyes like green-gold glass, and…

The fantasy vanishes when he makes the mistake of trying to move.

Pain lances up his leg, the worst pain imaginable, radiating from his foot outwards. He doesn’t think there are words in the human language to describe this sort of agony. There’s nothing left for him to do but to fall back on a muted, animal whine; a shadow falls over him, and Dean realizes, after a moment, that the shadow belongs to Gabriel standing over the bed with a phone in one hand and an expression that’s an odd mixture of possessiveness and tenderness.

“I’m going to call you back,” Gabriel says. Dean is almost out of his mind with pain – it hurts to _think_ , let alone breathe or, stars forbid, _move_ \- but his brain is also focusing on the oddest details. Like the fact that the phone Gabriel is holding is the one that he conjured up when Dean asked for his cell number. It’s bright green. _Too_ green. The color hurts his eyes, and Dean tries to turn his head away, but everything _hurts_.

“Well, at least now I know what’s wrong with you,” Gabriel mutters, and then he kneels down at the end of the bed and reaches for Dean’s foot.

“ _No_.” If Gabriel touches him, something awful will happen. Dean’s so sure of it that he feels sick with the knowledge – Gabriel touching his foot will end _horribly_ , and Dean tries to kick out, suffused with a strength that seems to come out of absolutely _nowhere_. But however strong he suddenly feels, Gabriel is still ten times stronger than any human, and he grabs a hold of Dean’s left ankle and then starts to patiently work the boot off his foot. “No,” Dean says again, fainter, and then another surge of strength raises his voice, “ _Stop_!” He tries to kick out again, but Gabriel easily holds him down.

He doesn’t feel in control of his limbs. It’s like the terror is a string connected to his brain, and someone far away is pulling, _pulling_ on it.

Gabriel strips off Dean’s sock, then makes a soft, angered noise, caught somewhere at the back of his throat. It’s almost a growl. “Here’s the problem,” Dean hears, and then Gabriel presses his fingers to the pale, thin skin of Dean’s foot, just below his ankle. The pain flares into a supernova, no longer just physical, but mental and fucking _spiritual_ as well. It’s like Dean can feel it clawing into his chest and trying to make a go for his soul. Like the pain is an infection that’s lodged itself under his skin, and it has to be lanced before it can be cleaned and healed.

He doesn’t have enough sense left in him to be ashamed. He screams as Gabriel draws his fingertips over his skin, a gentle sweeping motion, like he’s brushing away a speck of dirt.

Something flashes, but Dean can’t tell if it’s in his head or if it actually _exists_. He thinks he can smell something, something rank and disgusting, like rotten eggs. It’s too thick to be only in his imagination…isn’t it?

He doesn’t get the chance to ask. Gabriel takes his fingers away, and then makes a noise of discontent and presses them closer, harder this time, and Dean’s eyes roll back into his head. He passes out again.

It’s almost like falling asleep.

~

Dean wakes up for the second time that day, feeling groggy and sore, but not sore in the way that says he’s been working hard, or he, maybe, happened to bring someone back to his apartment the previous night. This is sore like he’s getting over a fever, a deep ache in his muscles that can’t be explained physically.

He tries to move his arm, just testing the waters, and finds, to his surprise, that it isn’t as difficult as the soreness would have made him think. He cautiously opens his eyes, wincing slightly at how bright the overhead light it.

There’s a warm, heavy weight lying next to him. Dean turns his head, and comes almost nose-to-nose with Gabriel. His hair is fanned out around his head like a corona, and his eyes are that curious mixture of green and gold. As Dean watches, the metallic sheen fades, and then vanishes entirely, and he’s left looking at the angel that he… _was_ interested in.

He tries to glance away. Dean’s always been good at lying to himself, but not when other people are watching.

“Welcome back to the land of the living,” Gabriel murmurs.

Dean swallows. His throat is dry. “What happened?”

“First you have to promise you won’t try and kill me.”

“I couldn’t even if I wanted to.” And Dean is surprised by that. That he doesn’t _want_ to hurt Gabriel. He just…wants to roll over and go back to sleep. Forget that all of this ever happened.

Maybe get a new apartment, a smaller place that’s closer to the city. Something to help him forget.

“You’re angry.”

“Yes,” he says. “That’s how humans act when they feel _betrayed_.”

“Ah.” Dean closes his eyes. He desperately wants some water, but he also doesn’t want to move. Even though Gabriel is right next to him, he’s…comfortable. “But that isn’t true.”

“What isn’t true,” he mutters.

“Well, number one, I never betrayed you. I just…didn’t tell you the whole truth about why I’m here.”

“Lying by omission is still lying.”

Gabriel laughs softly. “And number two, you aren’t human.”

Dean opens his eyes again. The room seems dimmer, somehow. Did Gabriel turn off the lights? But no, he can still see. He can still feel, and hear, all of his senses are intact. And yet…there’s no way that he just heard what he thinks he heard. Because there’s no possible way that Gabriel just said…

 _Glass and ceramic smashing against the far wall as Gabriel stands there, surprised and solemn, and suddenly everything hurts, his body is made of agony and Dean looks down at the shards of detritus littering the kitchen floor, and it hurts, it hurts…_

“I,” he says, and tries to swallow, but his throat clicks like bones knocking together. “I don’t…”

“Don’t tell me I’m lying. Because I’m not.”

 _I wasn’t_ , he wants to say, but that’s a lie, too, because if there’s even the slightest chance that Gabriel is fucking with him he wants to take it, wants to hold on to it and not let go, because he’s spent his whole damned _life_ coming to terms with what he is, with the fact that, even if he isn’t technically human, he’s something _lesser_ that just so happened to be born to an unfortunate family of gods. He’s powerless. He’s…he’s half-bred. _Unnatural_.

“You pulled all those dishes out of the cupboard,” he says, but his voice is shaking and, he realizes a moment later, so are his hands, when he raises them, when he tries to turn onto his side so he can look at Gabriel better. “You…”

“I didn’t.”

“But that’s impossible. I’ve…I’m type AB! I’ve donated blood before!”

“And I’m sure blood banks were very grateful,” Gabriel says blithely. “But that doesn’t change the fact that you aren’t human. Never have been.”

“But…”

“No. I’m going to make you a deal, Dean. You shut up, for _once_ in your life, and I will tell you _everything_. What you are, and what’s been hunting you and your brother since the day you were born, and why my _idiot_ brother decided that sealing you away was a good idea.”

“Sealing me…?”

“ _No_ talking.”

Dean closes his mouth.

He shuts up.

“You already know that Zachariah is my brother,” Gabriel says. “And my superior, as well. Here’s what you don’t know. Twenty-seven years ago, Zachariah was assigned to your family as a guardian. This was before the world knew about angels, so there was a strict policy of…non-interference, except in the case of emergencies.”

“Why my family?”

“Because of a prophecy. _Don’t_ give me that look, Heaven takes prophecies _very_ seriously. And so does Hell. A few thousand years ago there was a huge to-do about the union of certain supernatural beings bringing about a sort of…golden age of human prosperity. No one understood it at the time, but the prophet was very, very specific about which bloodlines to follow.”

“And those bloodlines are…me. My family.”

“And others as well, but yes. Hate to say it, Deano, but we’ve been hanging around the Winchesters and the Campbells for a long, long time. And it just so happened that Zachariah was assigned to you, and he fucked up. Big time. See, Heaven’s not the only one keeping an eye on your family.”

“Demons,” Dean says. He’s almost desperate for a drink of water, but he feels like he can’t move.

“Hell in general, actually. There’s a lot of history there, but we’ll save that for another day. Suffice to say, at the same time as angels have been assigned to protect you, demons have been sent to make sure the prophecy is delayed for as long as possible. If you’re confused, don’t worry, it’s perfectly natural. Politics are a bitch to follow, whether they’re human or celestial.”

“I need some water,” Dean says. His voice is raspy. “And maybe some booze, before I’m ready to deal with all this bullshit.”

“Alcoholism never solved anything.”

But when Dean rolls over and attempts to sit up, possibly with the intention of punching Gabriel in the face (he feels sore, but not so sore that hitting _that_ particular brick wall will be unsatisfying), he’s confronted with said angel holding out a glass of water, ice clinking softly against the sides. He’s smiling.

“I haven’t forgiven you,” Dean says sharply.

But he takes the glass, and the first sip is _beyond_ amazing. He sighs in relief; his throat feels marginally less like it’s been lined with sandpaper.

“I don’t need you to forgive me. I only need you to understand.” But there’s a note of sadness in Gabriel’s voice that makes Dean think he’s lying. It’s there and gone again, almost too fast to notice, but somehow Dean catches it.

That frightens him.

“But I’m human,” is the only thing that he can think to say. “I’ve never been able to do the things that Sam can do. I can’t make it rain or, or teleport. _None_ of that stuff.”

“That’s because Zachariah made a mistake. He basically looked away to file his nails for a minute, and when he looked back your family was being attacked. Your mother was already dead. Your father was risking his life to try and save her. Zachariah had the choice of directly protecting you, or protecting your father, and he decided that John Winchester was of a higher priority at the time. Stupid, if you ask me.”

Dean closes his eyes for a moment. The water is cold against his palm.

“What happened?” He feels Gabriel shift against his side. He’s surprised that neither of them have actually moved _away_ from each other, yet. “If I wasn’t being…Shouldn’t I be dead? Shouldn’t _Sam_ be dead?”

“There are a lot of people out there who _should_ be dead, according to Hell. They’ve been taking steps to rectify that. Some of those battles we win, some we lose.”

It doesn’t take a genius to make that particular leap of logic. “The murders?”

“Unfortunately. And I really hate to say it, but Zachariah’s idiocy might have actually helped to keep your family safe. For a while, at least.”

“He let my mother _die_. How the _fuck_ is that keeping us safe?”

“He sealed you.”

“He _what_.”

“There isn’t an earthly word for it, and if I told you the angelic term your eardrums would rupture. He sealed your powers away. Like…throwing a blanket over a lamp. For a while it made it so that you were effectively invisible, and you lent that invisibility to the people around you, to a certain extent. But that kind of seal isn’t meant to be kept in place for so long. He’s needed to renew it a few times already.”

 _I’m scared, Sammy. What if I can’t help you anymore?_

Dean shakes his head. No. No way. There’s absolutely _no way_ any of this can be true. Gabriel is just…he’s just fucking around. Didn’t Gabriel used to pose as a god? A Trickster? That would be just like him, convincing Dean that he’s…

Because, he realizes, _that_ is true. He’s _convinced_. Because it’s something that he’s always been told is out of his reach. Because it’s something he’s been secretly wanting his whole life.

To be normal. To be like his brother. Even if he’s not _entirely_ like Sam, at least he’s a little bit closer…

“So, what, he just…conveniently forgot to renew it this time?”

“Heaven’s been rather busy trying to keep up with these murders, you know. Whatever soldier Hell has sent, it’s quick, and clever. We haven’t been able to catch it.”

“Bobby said that…Dad thought it was a demon. That he’d been close to catching it. I remember…on the night of the fire, I saw it, standing in the window. It had yellow eyes.”

“ _Azazel_. That explains a lot.”

There’s a long pause. Dean is sure that he has something else he should say, but he can’t think of it. Mostly…mostly he just wants to close his eyes and sleep for a while. To just stop thinking and _be_ , but he knows the chances of that happening are slim to none. His brain is so full of new and _crazy_ information that he’s pretty sure he couldn’t sleep, even if he tried. There’s just way too much going on.

“Sort of wish Sam was here,” he sighs. “Sam is… _so_ much better at dealing with this sort of ridiculous shit.”

“Well, he is studying to become a lawyer.”

“I don’t even want to know how you know that.”

“Read your mind.”

“Bullshit.”

“Well, all right. More like read the text he sent you.”

Dean frowns, and then reaches clumsily towards his pocket, his hand brushing against Gabriel’s hip along the way. He pulls out his cell phone and flips it open. Sure enough – one new text.

 _didn’t know a lot of lawyers double majored in English,_ the text says. _might take a few classes and maybe do an extra semester please call haven’t heard from you in days_

Weird. Sam’s usually the one harping on Dean to remember to capitalize, and use periods and commas, things like that. He closes his phone and lets his hand fall upon his chest. Gabriel shifts away from him for the first time, and Dean realizes that, even if he _is_ a god (and he still wants to assume that he isn’t), he’s obviously not a very good one. He misses the warmth immediately.

“At least he’s safe.” Safe in California. Far, far away from Dean, and this thing that’s hunting their family. As long as it stays away from California, everything will be…fine. As fine as things _can_ be.

“No one will be safe until this creature is caught and destroyed,” Gabriel says. “But…yes. As long as no one knows where he is, your brother is a little bit less likely to die.”

“Way to build up my confidence.” Dean purses his lips. There’s something bothering him. Something that he should say. Sam is all the way across the country, and Dean hasn’t gone around shouting at people that his brother is attending college at Stanford, but…

“Bobby knows,” he says. That’s…correct, yes, but it doesn’t feel _right_.

“Robert Singer? Your father’s friend?”

“Yeah.”

“Your father spoke highly of him. Did you tell him where, in California?”

“No.”

“Then I’m inclined to think that, even if he were accosted, he would have little to say.”

There’s something else. He knows it. He _knows_ it, but it’s hovering just out of reach, it’s…

“Oh,” he says. _Oh_.

“What?”

“I told Ash. I told Ash that Sam came in from Palo Alto.”

“Who’s Ash?”

“A guy. He’s my friend, I work with him.” Dean swallows. “I haven’t seen him a lot, lately. We’ve been working different shifts, and he’s been hanging out with this new guy, I don’t know, Fred something. But he texted me and I told him that Sam was coming in from Palo Alto. He never answered, I don’t know what he’s been doing all week.”

“How much do you trust him,” Gabriel demands. “This friend of yours.”

Fuck. Way to put a guy on the spot. Dean bites his bottom lip, trying to think. Does he trust Ash? Yes. With his own secrets. With _himself_.

Does he trust Ash with his brother?

“Not enough,” Dean says, and Gabriel reaches across him, grabs his hand and squeezes it.

“You might want to hold on, then.” Dean catches a glimpse of Gabriel’s smile, a quick, sharp thing, like a handful of needles. It is not the smile of a creature that is glad, but rather the smile of a creature that is going to war. “We’re taking a trip.”

Dean closes his eyes, and the world moves around him.

~

They appear outside of an apartment building. Dean has never been to Palo Alto – California, yes, but not this place that Sam has adopted as his home away from home (or maybe as his _actual_ home, since, as far as Dean knows, Pennsylvania holds no overwhelmingly wonderful memories for his brother). He’s surprised to find that it looks pretty much like any other small-sized city in California. Tree-lined streets. Houses with swimming pools. An In-N-Out Burger on the corner.

But there aren’t any people. That’s the first thing that tips Dean off. You know, as soon as his head stops spinning and he finds his feet again.

“Never do that again,” he gasps, feeling as if he’s going to puke up his lungs, or collapse, or both. He realizes that the feeling of almost collapsing is because he is, abruptly, _upright_ , rather than lying down, and Gabriel is standing next to him, staring up at the top floor of the apartment building. His jaw is clenched.

“Something’s wrong.”

“No shit,” Dean coughs. “How about you warn a guy, next time. Where’s Sam?”

“Inside.” A pause. “I think.”

“You _think_?”

“That’s what’s wrong. I can’t feel him. I can’t feel _anything_. Correct me if I’m wrong, since it’s been a while since I actually lived among humans, but it’s _weird_ for an entire apartment complex to be empty, isn’t it?”

“Very weird,” Dean says faintly. _Sam_ , he thinks, _Sam is in there, he has to be, I don’t know what I’ll do if he isn’t, if he’s gone, if he’s…_

He can’t think it. _Can’t_.

“Has there been anyone new in your life, recently?”

Dean blinks. Why aren’t they charging into the apartment? Why aren’t they breaking down the doors and saving Sam? If he needs saving at all, that is. There’s still a chance that this is just…a mistake. That Sam will walk out any second, asking why they’re standing out in the middle of the sidewalk like idiots, blocking the way for other people…

Except there are no other people. There aren’t any cars, or joggers, or people coming out to get their mail. There’s no one.

Dean shivers. “Aside from you and, uh, Castiel,” he says, trying to think. “Like I said, there was a new guy at work. Ash kept inviting me to meet up and have a beer with them both, but I just…never did.”

“That’s probably for the best. You can slip a lot of things into someone’s drink without them knowing.”

“ _Stars_.”

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Gabriel says, his voice softer, as if he’s telling Dean a secret. “You’re going to wait out here, where the rest of Heaven can at least _see_ you, and I’m going to go inside and…”

Dean doesn’t wait for Gabriel to finish. “No,” he says, and then, when Gabriel tries to speak over him, “ _No_. I’m going inside.”

“Don’t be an idiot. You might not be human, but you aren’t invulnerable, either. You aren’t like your brother.”

“No,” Dean agrees, because _that_ he can feel. He knows he isn’t like Sam, no matter what Gabriel’s been telling him about…not being human this whole time. But he has to be able to do _something_ \- what’s the point of being a god if he can’t help his brother? Gabriel makes a soft, exasperated noise as Dean brushes past him, heading for the front door to the complex.

“You won’t be able to get in! If the whole building is warded…”

Dean doesn’t listen. There’s a steady pulse, like the beat of a drum, thrumming in his ears. _Sam is in trouble_ , it says, _Sam needs your help_. He doesn’t know why that realization fills him with a sense of vigor, rather than a sense of despair. He’s worried, yeah, but, more than that, he’s _angry_. Angry that something is trying to hurt his brother. _Daring_ to try and hurt his brother, when it’s been Dean’s job to keep Sam safe all these years. Dean’s saved Sam from impossible situations before. He’s saved him from monsters. Werewolves. Vampires. Wendigos.

He can save him from a demon, too.

When Dean reaches out to grab the doorknob, the metal is hot, _blazing_ hot against his palm, but it’s a recognition of temperature, not of sensation. He knows that it’s hot, but it doesn’t hurt. And when Dean turns the knob, it moves easily, and the door swings open without resistance.

The smell is what hits him first.

It’s a thick, meaty smell, like a steak that’s been left out on a counter on a hot day, not long enough to go rancid, but long enough for the smell to permeate the room. It’s an iron smell, gag-inducing, and Dean covers his mouth and nose, resisting the urge to vomit.

He’s surprised he manages, because the walls are also covered in blood.

That’s not right, though. Because saying that the walls are covered in blood makes it sound like someone took a can of pig’s blood and a paint roller and just went to town on the place, but that’s not it at all. It isn’t _just_ blood – it’s pieces of bone and tooth littering the floor. It’s globs of hair and skin oozing sloppily down the walls on trails of gore. It’s a pile of intestines splattered against the wallpaper. It’s the smell of blood and shit, oppressively rank in such a confined space.

It’s a slaughterhouse.

Dean hears a low whistle just behind him, and then Gabriel squeezes past him, stepping into the middle of the hallway and spinning in a slow circle. “Reminds me of the old days. Sacrifices weren’t all about virgins, then.”

“Sam is here,” Dean says.

“Well, I’d _hope_ so, considering my theory.”

“Theory?”

“That Azazel has been trying to get you and your brother alone for a while, now.”

“Sam isn’t alone. He lives with...”

Oh. _Oh_. “He lives with Jessica,” Dean says faintly, and Gabriel shrugs.

“Pray she’s still alive, then.”

Dean doesn’t have time for praying. He pushes past Gabriel, heading for the flight of stairs he can see at the end of the hallway. Sam is on the top floor. Dean has never seen this building before, and Sam has never mentioned his apartment in such great detail that the topic of floors came up, but he _knows_. The same way he’d known that he’d be able to open the door, the same way he’d known, once upon a time, that he could put his shoulder against a cheap, motel-room door and be able to hold it while a monster slammed itself against the other side. He _knows_.

The stairs are slick with blood, and other things that Dean doesn’t want to think about, but he never once loses his footing. Gabriel follows behind him, his expression completely neutral.

“This isn’t random,” he murmurs. His hand strays towards the wall, like he wants to trail his fingers through the smears of blood, but he doesn’t. Dean is inexplicably grateful. It’s like he’s just watched a former alcoholic restrain himself from having just one more beer with dinner, but he can’t exactly say why.

“What isn’t?”

“The blood. There are patterns. They look like sigils of containment.”

“Like what you said before? Wards?”

“No, different. These aren’t meant to keep someone out, they’re meant to keep someone _in_.”

“I don’t care what they’re meant to do. If Sam’s hurt, I’m going to rip this thing apart.”

Gabriel nods solemnly.

They climb.

The stairs seem to go on forever – Dean wishes that they could have taken an elevator, except there’s a part of him that knows that it’s easier to engineer someone’s death when they’re trapped in a small metal box, suspended over a great height. But Sam is on the top floor, and the stairs seem endless, even though they eventually _do_ reach the top floor. This hallway, unlike the first floor, is spotlessly clean. No sound comes from any of the apartments, and they leave red footprints behind them as Dean leads Gabriel further and further away from the only exit.

 _Bizarrely, the smell is worse, up here. Not just the smell of the blood and gore that covers their shoes, but a weird, rotten-eggs smell that makes Dean think of volcanoes, and the fire that consumed his house._

 _“Sulfur,” Gabriel says. And then Dean brings them to a stop in front of the apartment at the end of the hallway, and Gabriel recoils. “You’re sure this is the right one?”_

 _“You can’t feel it?” _Sam_. Sam is here, right _here_ , and Dean’s never been so sure of anything in his entire life._

“I told you, I can’t feel anything.”

“Then you aren’t useful.”

Gabriel _growls_ , and fuck, but Dean shouldn’t shiver at that, not right here, right now, but he _does_. It strikes some hesitant chord in him, a combination of unease and curiosity as he stares at the door to his brother’s apartment. Beyond it, a monster awaits. “If this is about my not telling you the _whole_ truth, I’m sorry, okay? And that’s not something I say lightly, so if you’re going to keep harping on it, then I…”

“Gabriel,” he says firmly, “You can tell me the _whole truth_ over dinner, _after_ my brother is safe.”

He doesn’t see Gabriel’s smile, but he’s sure that it’s there as Dean reaches for the doorknob, and then, finding the door locked, puts his shoulder up against the cheap wood and _shoves_.

The door doesn’t splinter, but it _does_ creak ominously, and then, with a crack of wood, it jolts inwards, sending Dean stumbling past the threshold and leaving Gabriel standing out in the hallway.

The apartment is small and sparse enough to fit on a typical college student’s budget, which means that the living room contains no television, and the couch was probably found at a junk shop or sitting beside the road, and the kitchen, from what Dean can see of it, is actually the most well-stocked room in the place, with rows of spice jars sitting neatly on a rack across from the entryway, and a string of pans hanging over the stove.

There is no blood anywhere, but the smell of sulfur is pervasive.

“Dean, wait,” Gabriel says. “Remember what I said about wards?”

Dean tilts his head, listening. Gabriel’s voice sounds muffled, like he’s trying to talk through a piece of cotton, but there’s something else there, too, a low _thump_ , and then…and then _shouting_.

“Dean? _Dean_! Get _out_ , Dean! Run!”

“I can’t get _in_!” Gabriel shouts, his voice still so _soft_ , and Dean presses the heels of his palms against his temples, pressing, as if somehow he can figure out a way to attend to both Sam _and_ Gabriel…

But then Sam _screams_ , and underneath it is the sound of Jessica crying, and Dean’s mind is made up. He barrels down the short hallway towards the bedroom at the very end, the door closed and Gabriel shouting after him, _You’re going to get yourself killed, you need to erase the sigils around the door, Dean you idiot_, but that’s _Sam_ in there, screaming out in pain, and there was never really a choice, once that was put on the table. Sam is his _brother_ , so he lowers his shoulder and braces himself for impact as he launches himself at the closed door. His body feels like fire and electricity; he has to get to Sam.

The bedroom door is not locked, the way the outer door had been. It holds steady for only a brief moment, and then gives with a thunderous _crack_ of wood, and the squeal of bending metal as the hinges twist. Dean tries to rear back, to compensate for the sudden loss of support, but he’s moving too fast – he goes sprawling across the floor, but he doesn’t feel it. His hands should be aching from catching his weight, but there’s nothing.

“Oh,” he hears. “I admit, I was expecting you earlier. And…not quite so _alone_. Must mean my scribbles out there were more effective than I’d hoped for.”

It isn’t Sam’s voice, but Dean can hear Sam breathing, harsh and quick, and Jessica making a sound that’s half sob and half snarl. He pushes himself up, and sees, for the first time up close, the demon that killed his mother and father.

There’s a part of him that wants to refuse to believe that this is _the_ creature. He looks like any other person you might run into on the street. No, he looks…he looks like a _carpenter_. Like a construction worker. Like an average Joe who just so happens to be good enough with his hands that he can make a living off of it. His hair is graying and short, and he has the sort of face that looks like it could break into a smile any minute. He’s wearing a jacket with the sleeves rolled up, and old blue jeans, and sturdy leather boots. His forearms are covered with deep welts.

But then he looks into Azazel’s yellow eyes, and he remembers that whatever body he’s looking at has probably be empty for years. Whatever made this a _person_ is long gone.

“Dean,” Jessica chokes out; Azazel is holding her against the wall across from the bed, pinning here there. There’s blood trickling from her mouth, covering her teeth when she speaks, and there’s blood dripping down onto the floor. She’s wearing a pale blue t-shirt, and a white skirt – both are stained red. It looks liked she tried to fight back, and Dean is stupidly proud of her. Proud of Sam for finding such a strong girlfriend.

His attention snaps to the bed, then, where Sam repeatedly strains against bonds that Dean cannot see. He’s spread-eagled on top of the sheets, shirtless, wearing only his boxers – his wrists and ankles are swollen and red. When Dean looks closer, he realizes why: there are symbols branded into the skin there, _seared_ there. There’s a larger symbol painted on Sam’s chest, over his heart, in something that smells like blood, but looks like motor oil. The symbols are on the floor, too encircling the bed like barbed wire. Looking at them for too long makes Dean’s eyes hurt.

Behind him, Gabriel slams his fists against whatever barrier prevents him from entering the apartment, but Dean can’t hear what he’s screaming. It’s like there’s an invisible wall between them.

All of this he takes in, in the course of a few seconds: Jessica, Sam, Gabriel, Azazel smiling at him with his yellow eyes and his mouthful of blunt teeth.

Then he picks himself up off the floor, and says, “Let them go.”

Azazel’s smile grows wider. “Oh? After all the years I’ve spent trying to track you two down? All the planning I’ve done? And do you have _any_ idea of the time I had to spend working on your dear friend in order to get him to talk? And after all that, you want me to just…let you _go_. I don’t think so, Dean.”

 _Dean swallows. _Ash_. Ash, whose only crime was being too friendly for his own damn good. “Gabriel,” he calls out, “Go back to Penn’s Creek and find Ash. Make sure he’s all right.”_

“It’s a bit late for that.”

“Fuck you,” Dean spits – there’s a fluttering motion, out of the corner of his eye, and when he turns his head to look Gabriel is gone.

“Poor Dean Winchester. Left _all_ alone. But that’s the way it’s always been, hasn’t it?” Jessica kicks out with one foot, trying to break free despite the amount of pain she must be in; Azazel’s response is to shake her like a terrier shaking a rat. “Never quite lived up to your father’s expectations…through no fault of your own, of course. Sealing you away from me, now _that_ was inspired. Stupid, but inspired.”

“Dean,” Sam says – his voice is slurred, like he’s drunk, or…or drugged. “Whatever it says, don’t listen to it. _Please_.”

“Oh, Sammy, _it_? I’m hurt. Truly.”

“At least let Jessica go,” Dean tries. It’s desperate, and he knows it, but he’s willing to give it a shot. “She has nothing to do with this.”

“Well, aside from providing an amusing symmetry between your mother’s death and the impending death of baby brother’s new piece of skirt…but you know, I think I would kill her for far less than that.”

Jessica closes her eyes; there’s blood dripping down her legs - long, winding trails of red. Dean can’t see where the wound is. Her shirt isn’t torn, just stained crimson. He can’t tell if she was stabbed or burned or…or something else

“I have waited so long for this,” Azazel says. “You have _no_ idea. I think I’m going to kill dear Sammy, first, and make you two watch. And then I’ll kill pretty Jessica. And you know what? Then I think I’ll kill your precious _angel_ , once he comes back, and there is _nothing_ that you will be able to do about it, because you are a sad excuse for a god, Dean Winchester. You are _powerless_. You were born stunted, and the removal of Zachariah’s seal has not changed that in the slightest.” Azazel smiles. “You are _just_ god enough to not be able to approach these seals. Just god enough to watch, helpless, as your brother dies.”

“Dean, please _go_ ,” Sam says, but his voice is muffled and distant, like he’s hearing him through a glass tank of water. Blood is rushing in Dean’s ears, and the only thing that’s clear is Azazel, Azazel taking a step away from Jessica and yet Jessica is still hovering there, pinned to the wall by invisible hands. Azazel turning towards the bed, facing Sam while Jessica’s eyes roll back into her head and she begins to slide, her toes pointed perfectly downwards and blood dripping down from her heels.

As Azazel reaches the edge of the bed, Sam and Jessica begin to scream at the same time. It’s a scream of agony, but not the sort of agony that means you need to go to the hospital. It’s not even the sort of agony that implies that you’re dying, but rather, it’s a scream that makes Dean think of how he’d felt when Gabriel was removing the sigil from his foot. Pain that reaches so far into you it’s like it’s touching your soul.

“Oh, yes,” he hears Azazel say. “You’re going to burn _very_ well.” He hears Sam’s scream choke off into a whine as Azazel grabs his throat. He hears Jessica’s screaming continue as she’s dragged, inexorably, towards the ceiling.

He thinks he hears (although it might just be his imagination) the sound of fluttering wings, and Gabriel’s voice - _Stunted? You show him who’s stunted. Kick his ass, Dean._

Dean has spent his whole life taking care of Sam. Helping him. _Saving_ him.

He isn’t about to stop now.

Sam’s eyes widen a split second before Dean makes his move, as if he knows what’s going to happen – for a moment, it looks like he’s going to try and shake his head, going to try and protest, even though Azazel is choking him, the demon’s fingers leaving behind what looks like _burns_. But Dean doesn’t care. He doesn’t know what will happen to him if he tries to approach the bed, if he tries to touch the seals – maybe it will hurt, like Azazel seemed to be implying. Maybe it will even kill him.

But maybe he can save his brother. Maybe.

He doesn’t think. He doesn’t plan it out, because there isn’t time for planning. He doesn’t consider the idea that he might be going to his death, because that’s less important than making sure that Sam gets out of this safe and sound.

He just narrows his eyes, and launches himself at Azazel. His boot lands on one of the painted symbols just as he throws his arms around the demon’s torso, digging his nails into whatever he can reach – one hand curves against Azazel’s face, and he makes an effort to reach those horrible, yellow eyes, clawing with his blunt nails. With the other hand he reaches for the fingers digging into Sam’s throat. It’s a messy, uncoordinated attack, and his father would shake his head in despair at it, but Dean has no weapons other than his hands and feet and teeth, and whatever powers he has as a god are intermittent and unreliable. He makes do with what he has.

Azazel makes a sound, an inhuman sound like a snarling bear, and tries to throw him off just as Dean’s thumb finds the soft curve of his eye, and just as a lancing pain slams into his chest. He thinks it might be what having a heart attack is like, but he isn’t sure – all Dean knows is that it _hurts_ , that it’s probably from trying to step over the seal surrounding Sam’s bed, but he also knows that he isn’t dead yet, and whatever pain he’s in he is going to make certain that Azazel feels it a hundred times over.

Sam has stopped choking – or the sound, at least, has stopped. Dean isn’t sure if he should be relieved or more worried, but all he can do is press his thumb forward and grit his teeth as something hot and oily covers his hand. It doesn’t feel anything like blood - it’s simultaneously too viscous and too slick, but Azazel _bellows_ , so Dean assumes he’s done something right. They both stumble backwards, away from the bed, and Dean feels something lightheaded and strange plant itself in his mind.

 _If only I were a bomb,_ he thinks, I could take this bastard outside and no one would get hurt. Everyone would be safe. If only I were a bomb.

“You have just made the biggest mistake of your sorry life,” Azazel growls. He wriggles like a snake, or an eel, but Dean refuses to let go – they both go crashing down to the floor, pain shooting through every inch of skin on Dean’s body. His organs feel like they’re being crushed in a trash compactor. “I am _not_ confined to only this sack of meat! And I am _patient_ , Winchester, and no matter how you try to stop me I will _always_ come back! There are millions of other bodies out there, all ripe for the taking, and they are all _mine_.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Dean grits out. Gabriel’s voice echoes in his head. _You know what they say? About growing up to be whatever you want. If it’s a bomb you want, Dean, then you’ll be a bomb._

“You can’t stop me.”

“Dean,” Sam says, voice faint; he can hear the sound of the sheets bunching around Sam’s feet. He can hear Jessica’s heels drumming against the wall, even over her sobbing. And he can hear Gabriel. Can almost smell him, beyond the smell of blood. The scent of chocolate and peppermint is faint, but…

“I’ll enjoy tearing apart your brother’s soul in Hell,” Azazel says, and Dean’s vision goes white. He feels the palm of his hand slam against Azazel’s mouth, hard enough to bruise, and he hears Sam yelling something in his faint, distant voice, and he can smell chocolate, and candy.

And he hears himself say, “I can try,” and then there’s nothing left but pain, the physical pain of crossing over those sigils and something deeper, something that expands from his chest and bursts outward, but the release of it does not foster relief – only more pain. He is a continuous font of white-hot magma. He is a weapon. He is a _bomb_.

He thinks he might hear Azazel scream, but it’s hard to tell.

He _knows_ he hears Sam. Sam saying “no” over and over again. But then that, too, fades, and the pain overtakes him, and Dean finally, finally loses consciousness.

~

Dean opens his eyes, and the first thing to register is that everything _hurts_. His hands, his legs, his _face_. Everything.

 _Déjà vu,_ he thinks, and even that is sort of painful, just _thinking_ , but still he expects to roll over onto his side and see Gabriel lying there, his expression solemn, getting ready to tell him that he’s…and Sam is…

 _Sam_.

“Sam,” he says, and _stars_ , but his voice is rough. He sounds like he hasn’t had any water for a week, and his throat feels like it’s lined with sandpaper, and everything is _horrible_. He tries to sit up, but moving too quickly makes his head spin, and he feels like he’s going to vomit, and…

 _Sulfur. Sam spread-eagle on the bed, straining against chains that weren’t actually there, symbols branded into his wrists and ankles, and Jessica pinned to the wall, those yellow eyes peering at him, and Gabriel standing out in the hallway, leaning against the threshold with all of his weight, hitting it, screaming but Dean can’t hear him, he can’t…_

“Sam,” he says again, and a cool palm presses against his forehead. Like ice on a swollen knee, the pain leeches out of his head, and Dean is left feeling peculiarly boneless as Jessica’s face hovers over him, smiling.

“Look who’s awake,” she says. She isn’t covered in blood, Dean notes. She looks happy.

“I thought…” he croaks, and then, “Is Sam…?”

“Hey, Dean.”

For a moment, it’s as if the world around him freezes. The last thing Dean remembers is Sam in pain, Jessica in pain, all of them about to be killed by the demon – by Azazel (it feels strangely cathartic, being able to give a name to the thing that’s haunted his family all these years). But now, here he is, lying on Sam’s bed with Jessica leaning over him, and Sam himself is standing at the foot of the bed, and both of them are _smiling_.

“What the fuck,” he croaks, and Sam laughs.

“Considering you’ve been unconscious for almost ten days, I was sort of thinking you’d say…something a little more _profound_.”

Ten days. _Ten_ days. Dean tries to reach up and touch his cheeks, wanting to make sure that he’s actually awake, but he hurts too much to move, and, on top of that, he feels _weak_. Like he’s just gotten over a bad case of the flu.

“I can’t…remember.”

“Gabriel said you might have a hard time of things when you woke up.”

Gabriel. The last thing Dean remembers of _Gabriel_ is telling him that they could discuss the whole truth over dinner, and Gabriel smiling at him, and…and then nothing. “What happened?”

Sam heaves a sigh, then glances at Jessica. “Hey, could you…get some water? I’m sure Dean’s tired of IVs.”

“Sure.” Jessica makes a short, awkward motion, as if she wants to take a step closer to Sam, but ends up changing her mind halfway through it. Instead, she touches Sam’s wrist on her way out of the room.

Dean can’t help but notice the movement – Sam’s wrists, he sees, are different. No longer unblemished and pale, now they’re ringed with thin, red scars.

Sam sees him looking and, as he sits down on the edge of the bed, he pulls his sleeves down further. It’s Southern California – he shouldn’t be wearing long sleeves.

“Tell me what happened,” Dean demands again, and Sam shifts uncomfortably.

“You, uh. You sort of blew up our bedroom.”

“ _What_?”

“Don’t worry, though, Gabriel and the rest of the angels are going to fix it! And…and everything else in the building.”

“I think you should start from the beginning.” Everything is fuzzy. Not completely there. He remembers standing outside in the bright sunlight, and he remembers stepping into the building, and there had been…

“Sam,” he says, “there was blood.” There was more than blood, there had been _organs_ , there had been bits of scalp with hair still attached - it had been like stepping into a nightmare. They had walked down the hallway and left footprints of blood. “How many people…?” _How many people died because I didn’t get here fast enough?_ “And…and Ash. I think…is Ash all right?”

 _But Sam is _smiling_ at him, a little sadly, a little fondly. But the fact that he’s smiling at all should be reassuring…right?_

“Well,” he says. “No one’s still dead.”

“ _Still_ dead?”

Sam bites his lip, looking uncomfortable. “A few minutes after…after what happened, Gabriel showed up with six other guys, and they sort of just… _fixed_ everything. They went into apartments, and when they came out again everyone was fine. Gabriel told me that Ash was going to be okay. A little banged up, but okay. They healed Jessica. They healed _me_. It was amazing; I’ve never seen anything like it. It was like…watching a bunch of Creators at work.”

Dean breathes a sigh of relief. “Everyone’s alive.”

“Yeah. Crazy, huh?”

“What about before all that? What happened to _me_?”

“I don’t really know how to explain it. I guess…you exploded. Sort of.”

“I think the fact that I’m still here sort of contradicts that, Sam.”

“It’s true. You dragged…” Sam pauses, eyes closing for a moment. He swallows, visibly, and then continues. “… _Azazel_ …to the floor. It said some things that I couldn’t hear, and then all this black smoke started coming out of it…And you just slammed your hand over its mouth, and it stopped. That’s when you started glowing.”

“ _Glowing_?”

“Yeah. Bright white. It was like trying to look at the sun.”

“That’s less awesome than what I was hoping for when I heard ‘exploded’.”

“The glow came _before_ the explosion. You looked up at me and you said ‘I’m sorry’, and then you…blew up. There was this huge sound, and the whole room went white, and then when I could see again you were lying on the floor, and so was Jessica, and I could move again. I mean, my wrists and ankles were kind of scraped up, but I could move.”

“What about Azazel?

“It was gone. Just gone. You were all…charred and fucked up, but there was nothing left of Azazel.”

“Charred?” Dean looks down at his hands and forearms, trying to see what Sam claims he saw – the skin blackened and twisted, his fingers probably thinner – “charred” implies that the flesh was burnt away, doesn’t it? He tries to picture himself as crumbling and skeletal, the way Sam must have seen him, but all he’s looking at is smooth, unscarred skin. Sam must be mistaken. He must not have been as bad as that.

“I thought you were dead at first,” Sam continues. “But you were still breathing, somehow. After that, Gabriel and the six other angels arrived, and Gabriel healed you.”

“So, let me see if I’m understanding this…Gabriel healed me, and the other angels brought everyone else in the building back to life, and they all did this in a single day?”

“They brought everyone back to life in a single day. It took a whole week for Gabriel to just get you _looking_ normal again. The last three days, you’ve been in some sort of coma.”

Dean grunts as he tries to sit up, shoving his elbows underneath himself and trying not to wince as every muscle screams in agony. Ten days, obviously, still isn’t enough for him to have healed completely, but he manages to prop himself up enough to look around the room where he’s been interred for ten days. It isn’t Sam’s apartment, is his first realization. There’s a television safely squared away in a cupboard at the foot of the two beds, and two dressers, a small closet, a large nightstand holding a lamp and an alarm clock…Dean recognizes the neutral wallpaper and the dark, easy-to-clean carpet, and the authentic imitation oak paneling on the nightstand and the entertainment center. They’re definitely no longer in Sam’s apartment. They’re not in _anyone’s_ apartment, for that matter – they’re in a hotel.

 _“Why are we in a hotel?”_

 _Sam rolls his shoulders in a rough approximation of a shrug. “We kind of…aren’t? We’re in Gabriel’s house.”_

 _“Gabriel’s house doesn’t look _anything_ like this.”_

“Yeah, I told him that if you woke up in a strange house you might freak out, but motels were neutral territory.”

“Sure, go ahead and blab about the deep dark secrets of my childhood,” Dean mutters, but he relaxes back into the comfortably worn sheets, the pillow smelling faintly of lavender – there had been a motel that they’d stayed at, right before Dean took Sam and left, where the cleaning woman had covered the beds with linen spray. It had smelled like magnolias, not lavender, but he still turns his head to the side and feels comforted.

Stupid, to take comfort from the smell of motel pillowcases, but that was how life worked.

“Where is he now?” His voice is slightly muffled by the pillowcase.

“Who, Gabriel?”

“Yeah. And all the other angels, I guess.”

“As far as I know, the other angels went back to…wherever it is they come from. Gabriel’s around here somewhere. I’ll tell him you’re awake, but really, you should be trying to get some more sleep. You’re not a hundred percent yet.”

“Don’t need to tell _me_ that. I feel like shit.”

“I’ll let Gabriel know,” Sam says, and then he pushes himself up from the bed; Dean notices that he’s limping, a little bit. Like putting weight on his ankles still hurts him, even after ten days and a little angel mojo.

“You tell him to get his ass in here right now,” Dean calls after Sam as he leaves. On his way out the door, Sam brushes shoulders with Jessica – she’s carrying a glass of water in one hand, a bowl of something in the other.

“Gabriel isn’t going to come, is he,” Dean says. It isn’t a question. He already knows the answer. He watches Jessica set the glass and bowl down on the nightstand, next to the alarm clock. The glass has a straw sticking out of it. The bowl is full of apple slices. Dean stares at them.

“I thought you might be hungry,” Jessica says.

“Not really.”

“You should still try to eat something. Just a little bit.”

“I would rather see Gabriel,” he insists. Stubbornly. Maybe even stupidly. Jessica looks at him, her bottom lip caught between her teeth, uncertain and unhappy.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I really am.”

“It’s okay.” Dean turns his head back, facing the opposite wall. There’s a small water stain, at the juncture between wall and ceiling, that’s shaped almost exactly like Oklahoma.

He stares at it until the ache in his skin and bones, and the pain in his head, and the heaviness in his chest is all too much to deal with, and he finally, finally drifts off to sleep. Not unconsciousness, but pure, uninterrupted sleep.

~

Dean sleeps. For the first time in months, he doesn’t dream – or if he does, he can’t remember the dreams when he finally opens his eyes and is faced, once again, with the neutral-colored wallpaper, the fake wood paneling, the water stain shaped like Oklahoma.

A shadow falls over him, but it takes a moment before it resolves itself into anything more than a vague shape. A shape that’s smiling at him. A shape with green eyes.

“Gabriel,” Dean says, and the angel smiles at him. It’s an uncommonly gentle smile – Dean wants to ask him what’s wrong, because surely something has to be _wrong_ if Gabriel is smiling like he means it.

“Sam told me you were awake.” Gabriel’s smile crumples in on itself, replaced by a look that, if anything, might be called neutral. “That was three days ago.”

“Fuck.” Dean reaches up to scrub at his eyes and cheeks, and is pleasantly surprised at the lack of pain. “Really? Three days?”

“What you did took a lot out of you.”

“Yeah, still not too clear on what exactly that was.”

Gabriel shrugs. “Does it matter? You saved everyone. You managed not to get yourself killed. What more could you ask for?”

“Answers, I guess.”

“Well, then prepare yourself for disappointment, because that’s not how the world works. Not even for gods.”

“Sam said you brought everyone back to life.” He doesn’t phrase it like a question, because he doesn’t think that, if he did, Gabriel would answer. Instead, he watches Gabriel’s expression, looking for some sign that might tell him whether or not what Sam said was true.

Gabriel’s face remains frustratingly blank.

“Well, some of them. Some were still alive. That makes you and Sam the only non-celestial beings on this planet who know the extent of Heaven’s power. Don’t tell anybody.” Dean smiles. “Seriously, don’t. You have no idea how much finagling it took to convince the higher ups not to make you forget _everything_.”

“Thanks for that,” Dean says dryly. Answers. Disappointment. He remembers saying, before, that Gabriel could tell him the whole truth over dinner. Dean wonders if it’s even worth pursuing; Gabriel watches him with hooded eyes, silent and contemplative.

“I thought things would be easier, with Azazel dead,” Dean murmurs. “Or that I would be…happier, somehow. But nothing’s really changed.”

“That’s life for you.”

“Life sucks. But I guess that’s normal.”

Gabriel is quiet for a long time. Long enough that Dean starts to get worried – he wonders if Gabriel will leave, now. If, since his mission is over, he’ll be returning to Heaven to carry out other angelic duties. If he’ll go the way of Castiel, wherever it is that Castiel ended up. If everything will just…go back to the way it was before.

He opens his mouth, intending to ask Gabriel to move the glass of water on the nightstand a little bit closer, but what comes out is, “I think I’ll go back to hunting.”

Gabriel looks at him, a sideways glance, but he doesn’t say anything, so Dean continues. “I mean, the only reason I settled down was because Sam wanted to go to school. And I thought I wasn’t cut out for it. Thought I’d get hurt too easily to be of use to anyone. Maybe that’s changed, now that I’m…not _sealed_ any more. There are still bad things out there. Demons. Monsters. Someone has to get rid of them.”

“Saving people, hunting things,” Gabriel murmurs. “Call it a family business, then.”

“Something like that.”

“You do what you have to do.”

“What about you?” Gabriel shifts, seemingly uncomfortable. Dean is almost afraid of the answer he might get. He swallows. “Any grand plans? I mean, I’m sure you’ll be going back to…wherever. An angel’s work is never done.”

“Yeah, about that,” Gabriel says, and then stops, staring at the alarm clock on the nightstand. It blinks a steady _12:12_ at them. As far as Dean knows, it hasn’t changed since he last woke up. He waits for what has to be several minutes, watching Gabriel stare at nothing.

“You have to finish,” Dean prompts, and Gabriel raises an eyebrow. “You can’t just leave it at ‘about that’.”

“I _could_.”

“And I _could_ punch you in the face.”

“I’ve requested that I be allowed to maintain my current assignment.”

Dean blinks, and Gabriel helpfully adds, “That’s you.”

“You’ve requested…?”

“Well, more like _demanded_. And when I say ‘demanded’, I mean in the most forceful and underhanded way possible.”

“You…”

“I blackmailed Zachariah. You have no idea how good it felt.”

“Considering he’s the one who ruined my life, I can kind of imagine,” Dean says faintly. Gabriel smiles, sharp and quick, but he doesn’t lean back, and he doesn’t say anything more. Dean mulls over the information that’s been presented to him. “So Zachariah is just…letting you stay?”

“Well, I’ll be tied to you. Wherever you go, I go. Originally, he agreed to just keep me assigned to Penn’s Creek, but I sort of had the feeling that you’d want to leave. I mean, what’s waiting for you here? Your friend Ash? Who’s a _real_ character, incidentally – he told me to give you his entire collection of Led Zeppelin records, but then he didn’t die, so it was sort of a moot point…”

“Gabriel,” Dean says.

“…And your brother, well, you don’t need to take care of him any longer, so you’re free to do whatever you want. And if that’s hunting down things that go bump in the night, well, bully if it makes you happy, but you should know that you aren’t as invulnerable as other gods, you’re actually…”

“ _Gabriel_.”

Gabriel pauses, blinking. “Yes?”

“Do you remember what I said?”

“You’ve said a lot of things, I can’t be expected to remember them all. Actually, I _can_ , but I don’t feel like it.”

Dean shrugs. A part of him wants to smile. Another part of him is still wary. Didn’t Gabriel once pose as a Trickster? Aren’t Tricksters supposed to be masters of lying? “What I said, about you telling me the whole truth.”

“Ah. _That_.”

“Yeah.”

Gabriel shifts, then, as if to get up from the edge of the bed. “If that’s how you feel. I’m sure Zachariah will be thrilled. You know, there’s an opening just waiting for me in Salvador. Beautiful bay, plenty of parties, nice people…”

“You can’t go to Salvador,” Dean says. “You owe me dinner.”

Gabriel stares at him, and Dean stares back. There has been, he realizes, a lot of staring going on. A lot of shrugging and glancing away, and looking determinedly in another direction…but not a lot of talking. Not a lot of actually _discussing_ what’s going on between them, what _could_ be going on between them.

There’s a whole lot of standing around thinking about doing things, but nothing actually getting _done_.

And Gabriel is looking at him. Not looking at him in discomfort, an _I don’t know what to say_ kind of look. He isn’t coming up with a joke or an insult to break the silence. He’s letting it linger there. Which isn’t exactly what Dean wants, because they should be _doing_ , they should be _saying_ , they should be anything but letting whatever it is that _could_ happen languish and die, because Dean is almost positive that there was something there. At some point between him daydreaming about green eyes and him realizing that Gabriel had lied, there had been a moment where he had looked at the possibilities laid out in front of him, and had thought them good.

 _Everyone lies,_ he thinks. _Even creatures that aren’t human._

“Say something,” he says. “Please.”

Slowly, Gabriel begins to smile at him. It’s a sharp smile, the sort of smile that might intimidate someone who didn’t know him. It’s a predator’s smile, but it’s also the smell of candy and chocolate and peppermint, it’s walking through the park in a dress shirt and slacks, it’s eating dinner in an Italian restaurant while Gabriel hums “Bella Notte” under his breath and surreptitiously tries to nudge meatballs off of Dean’s plate and onto his own.

It’s a smile that says _we kissed, once, and you leaned into me, and you breathed me in, and we could do it again. We could do it all again, because I want to._

“How do you feel about Mexican?” Gabriel asks, and Dean releases a breath he wasn’t even aware that he was holding.

“I like Mexican,” he says. “Mexican is perfect.”


	8. Four Months Later: Ends

 

“I still don’t get it,” Dean says.

“There are a lot of things you don’t get, so you’re going to have to be more specific.”

Dean reaches out, lightly smacking Gabriel on the arm. He keeps telling himself that he doesn’t have to be so careful, that he doesn’t _work_ that way, but this new knowledge of what he is has been wreaking having with his physical sense of identity. It’s been four months, and he still worries about stamping his foot and leaving a hole in the sidewalk. He worries about pulling Gabriel into a hug and crushing every bone in his vessel (no matter how many times Gabriel himself tells him that such a worry is absurd). He can’t actually _do_ any of those things – he’s a god, not the Incredible Hulk – but he still thinks about them. Dreams about them.

Gabriel leans away, laughing softly – the hammock they are lying in sways. Dean worries about it overturning, because he’s never laid in a hammock before, but he worries more about whether or not Gabriel will bruise when Dean touches him.

 _Don’t be stupid,_ he thinks, and then says, “This whole...being a god thing.”

“I doubt anyone is expecting you to pick it up overnight. You thought you were human, after all. Effectively, you _were_ human.”

“Yeah.” Dean tilts his head back, looking up at the sky. Gabriel is a line of inhuman warmth against his side. Dean hasn’t noticed any changes in his own body temperature – maybe that’s strange, but he feels glad of it. He doesn’t want to be different. He’s spent his whole life trying to fit in, and now, suddenly, he’s changed again. It’s frustrating. “But why? I mean…there are ways to identify gods. Body temperature is different. The blood type thing…and the stars know that I’ve been in and out of enough hospitals to have had a few pints pumped back into me. But no one noticed. Not a single person.”

Gabriel shifts slightly, tossing an arm around Dean’s waist. In the distance, he can hear the sound of construction – it’s his day off, but that sound still makes him want to get up and go to work. He supposes he’ll have to, once the Angelic manifestation laws pass, but until then he can devote himself to working on the Impala, driving her across the country, _helping_ people. Hunting down monsters. And, sometimes, taking a break and lying in a hammock with Gabriel, he guesses.

“I’ll let you in on a little secret,” Gabriel murmurs, and then stretches up to press a shivery kiss against Dean’s neck. Dean hums, curls his arm tighter around Gabriel’s shoulders, and draws him closer. There’s a heaviness in his gut that’s telling him he should forget propriety entirely and start pulling Gabriel’s clothes off right here and now.

“More secrets?”

“This one isn’t mine, so you can’t yell at me for it.”

“Whose is it, then?”

“Heaven’s. God’s, I suppose.”

Dean stretches his legs, blinking slowly. “If it’s your God’s, then maybe you shouldn’t tell me.”

“I’ve always been a rule-breaker.”

“You have.” Another kiss, and this time it’s sharper, more defined. Hungrier. “ _Stop_ ,” Dean says, but it comes out on the edge of a laugh. “If you’re going to tell me, tell me!”

“All _right_. So impatient. That’s a human trait you should probably work on.” Dean half-turns, frowning, and Gabriel sighs against his neck, a gust of warmth and the smell of chocolate and peppermint.

“The secret is,” he whispers, “that you aren’t the only one.”

Dean stills; he can hear the wind rushing through the trees, he can hear the construction in the distance, he can hear Gabriel’s breathing. And then, underneath all of that, if he concentrates very, very hard, he can hear the earth turning, the grass pushing up, the clouds scudding across the sky.

“The only what?”

“We call you passive gods,” Gabriel says. “Gods with human bodies. Gods whose powers only kick in when they’re…triggered, somehow. In your case, when you have someone to protect. You’re not the first, and you’re certainly not going to be the last.”

“I don’t understand.” But he feels as if he should. Like this is something huge, and all-encompassing. But Gabriel only kisses him again, this time at the curve of Dean’s jaw, and he can _feel_ the angel smiling.

“You can call it evolution, if you’d like,” he says. “Or you can call it a part of the universal plan. It doesn’t matter what anyone calls it, it only matters that it’s happening. But the secret is, there are fewer old gods than there used to be, and no one can dispute that. They’ve gone mad, they’ve destroyed themselves, they’ve disappeared…and within the next couple thousand years or so, there’ll be fewer new gods. And so on, and so forth, until eventually there’s nothing but humans, but humans with a spark of the divine in them. And maybe they’ll forget what they once were, and maybe they won’t…but the world will belong to them, and it’ll probably stay that way. They’ll fight their own monsters.”

Dean still doesn’t understand – maybe he isn’t supposed to, because it doesn’t feel as though he just doesn’t _know_ enough to understand what Gabriel is saying, it feels as though someone has draped a curtain over the part of his brain that’s meant to receive the information and process it. Dean closes his eyes, and hears the blood rush through his own body, and thinks about being human. _Truly_ human, and whether he would have found Gabriel if he _had_ been human, and what will happen to him, in the next thousand years? Ten thousand? Will he die, the way humans do? Or will he be like those old gods who, even today, make of themselves public figures, politicians, celebrities? Gods like Zeus and Thor?

Will Gabriel live on after him? Formless, yes, but _existing_?

It feels too big, what Gabriel’s just told him. Too big for Dean or anyone else to contain within themselves, so he listens to the blood pumping in his ears, and he blocks out the information as best he can, replacing it with the beat of his heart, and the warmth of Gabriel against his side, and the sound of construction, and the susurrus of the wind in the trees and the grass.

But there is a part of him that now knows this secret, will always know, and it tells him that there’s something he should do. Something big. Something _grand_.

He doesn’t want Gabriel to live forever, and in doing so forget that Dean ever existed. He wants him to _remember_.

He opens his eyes, and Gabriel is looking at him, really _looking_. Not smirking or grinning, not playing anything up. Just a long, steady look. Dean thinks about everything they’ve been through, and everything they _will_ go through, all the possibilities, all the hardships, the brilliant moments, fights, apologies, sex and days when they don’t have sex at all, Gabriel watching horrible soap operas, Gabriel accompanying Dean to football games, making dinner on the nights when they feel like they should create instead of destroy, visiting Sam and Jessica in California, _existing_.

Loving?

And Dean says, “I’ve always wanted to go to the Grand Canyon. The way me and Sam grew up…we never really had the chance.” He takes a deep breath, and feels the words _I think I might_ pushing against the backs of his teeth. But it isn’t time yet. He isn’t even sure if it’s right. “Want to go with me?”

And Gabriel smiles, and Dean knows that he isn’t that kind of god, but for half a second he’s utterly certain that the sun shines a little bit brighter, the wind blows a little brisker, the world is more _colorful_ with how happy he suddenly feels.

“Sure,” Gabriel says. “Why not?”

That’s a good philosophy, Dean thinks, as Gabriel rolls on top of him and then kisses him, kisses his mouth and kisses the curve of his jaw and kisses his neck, his fingers quick and deft against Dean’s shirt, pulling it up, the sunlight warm and the wind cool, and Dean _agrees_.

 _Why not,_ he thinks, and raises his mouth to Gabriel’s kisses, and the warmth, the breeze and the Grand Canyon, the many nights and days to come, and the possibility that maybe they won’t even get that far – maybe they aren’t as good for each other as they think, but, then again, maybe they are. _Why not._


	9. Four Months Later: Beginnings

 

It’s been four months since Dean and Gabriel killed Azazel, and Sam still has trouble sleeping at night. He knows he shouldn’t. Everything turned out all right – honestly, _Jessica_ is the one who should be waking up in cold sweats. She’s the one that should be haunted by nightmares, considering…what almost happened.

How she almost died.

“You almost died, too,” is always Jessica’s response, whenever he tries to bring up the fact that he’s totally wrong, somehow, he shouldn’t be _feeling_ like this. He’s a _god_ , for fuck’s sake, he should be…

But Jessica smiles and says, “Not every woman needs a big, strong man to protect her. Some of us do just fine on our own.”

Sam thinks back to how Azazel had needed to hold Jessica to the wall with both hands, how she’d fought back, how she’d gouged at him with her nails. She’d left smears of blood across the wall, hers and his, as Azazel had forced her upwards. Hers had been bright red. His had been almost black.

Sam can see it when he closes his eyes. The blood dripping from Jessica’s stomach. Azazel’s smile as he told her she was going to burn.

And then Dean, and Gabriel, bursting in and saving the day while Sam had been unable to do _anything_.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Jessica tells him. “Don’t be stupid. You couldn’t even _move_. Whatever that magic was, it was definitely designed to hold gods. Which, by the way, you _are_.”

 _I should have been able to help,_ Sam thinks, and he lies awake at night, and when he tries to close his eyes he sees Jessica’s face wreathed in flame.

 _They buy a new apartment. Sam tells Jessica that it’s not because the old one is full of nothing but bad memories – they need more space, that’s all. And it’s technically true, but it’s not the _whole_ truth. He thinks Jessica probably realizes this, but she doesn’t say anything about it, and Sam is grateful. They find a one-bedroom apartment that’s close to the school, one with a huge kitchen and a living room that’s just big enough for them to fit a couch and a television._

Sam’s emails are up to fifty a day. He answers them quickly, efficiently, but he can’t put any heart into them. Here’s a man who wants to win the lottery so he can buy a Porsche – Sam clicks _delete_ without even finishing the email. Here’s a ten year-old girl whose mother just lost her job. He tries to send a bit of luck their way, but even that feels forced. He _wants_ to, but he just…he just isn’t _feeling_ it.

Jessica is talking about getting a cat. Sam doesn’t tell her that the last time he was around a cat it was a Cath Paluc, and he, Dean, and their father had killed it and then burned its corpse out behind an abandoned Dairy Queen in rural Wisconsin.

He thinks she would probably appreciate his silence, if she knew.

Sam closes his eyes for a moment, and almost immediately he feels warm arms rest against his shoulders, a slim hand running through his hair and then touching his neck, gently, reverently. Sometimes, when Jessica is in the right mood, she treats him like he’s made of blown glass. Sometimes she wants to be rough with him. Sam is fine with both, and he tilts his head back and keeps his eyes closed, humming softly as Jessica leans over him and kisses him, soft and sweet.

“You’re in a mood,” she says, and Sam makes a noncommittal noise. “A _mood_. You gonna tell me what’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I’m fine.” Jessica’s touch grows firmer, almost a grip against his scalp, and Sam laughs. “ _Seriously_! I’m…I’m good, Jess. I really am.”

“You’re a terrible liar, Sam Winchester.”

“Maybe I’m just _pretending_ to be a terrible liar. Ever think of that?”

“No,” Jessica says, “because it isn’t true. You _are_ a very bad liar. This isn’t about…what happened, is it?”

Sam says nothing, and Jessica makes a soft, determined sound. Her arms drift from around Sam’s shoulders to under his arms, and she hauls him up with all the strength that she can muster, dragging him away from the computer, his email, the world outside asking him, for the most part, for _things_ instead of miracles; pocket change instead of real change. Sam laughs, would kick his feet out in protest except Jessica isn’t anywhere near tall enough to actually lift him off the floor, so he settles for flailing his hands in a mockery of distress.

“I’m being kidnapped!” he shouts, and tilts his head back and laughs again when their next-door neighbor (whom they have yet to meet) bangs on the wall in response and shouts for them to be quiet, or call the police, or _both_. “My girlfriend is kidnapping me!”

“You bet your ass I am. I’m kidnapping you back to bed, and I’m gonna make you forget _all_ about demons and angels. Nothing but us.”

Sam smiles, and then deftly spins himself around, breaking Jessica’s underarm hold and pulling her close. She’s laughing, she’s got her head thrown back in joy, and Sam can hardly understand how she can be like _this_ after what they went through.

“I’m gonna get you, Sam,” she mock growls, and even though they’ve made the deal before – no powers in the bedroom unless explicitly stated and discussed beforehand – he almost wants to surprise her, almost wants to bring lightning and thunder into the room while they make love, wants to use his strength to impress her, he wants to be a _god_ for her. Not just a boyfriend.

But then he remembers that Jessica is human, and he loves her, he really thinks he does, but there are some things that humans just can’t take.

“Is that so?” He bends his head down, presses a kiss to the curve of Jessica’s neck and smiles when she hums, happily, in response. “Well, I guess first you’re going to have to…”

There’s a knock at the front door.

 _Catch me,_ Sam had wanted to say; he’d wanted to get at least _some_ of this nervous energy out of him, before they got all their clothes off. A chase was always good for that, and he’d planned on leading Jessica on a futile one around the apartment, but…

“Ignore it and they’ll go away,” Jessica murmurs, and tilts her head up in invitation.

Another knock. More insistent, this time, and Sam sighs and then lets go of Jessica with a shake of his head.

“I don’t think they will. Dean knocks like that.” He gets a blank look in return, and elaborates, “Dean doesn’t tend to go away if you ignore him.”

“ _Ah_.” Sam nods in unhappy agreement, then leaves Jessica, her warmth, her hands on his shoulders, in order to answer the door. The knocking only grows louder and more persistent as he gets closer, but it never quite crosses the line from “knocking” to “pounding”. Sam is gritting his teeth by the time he finally pulls open the door.

“ _What_.”

Standing there, out in the hallway, is quite possibly the most ethereal-looking man Sam has ever seen, and he’s seen Eros up close (once, and never again, considering what happened). He’s got blue eyes, blue like a glacier or an ocean completely devoid of life, the sort of color that seems impossible because there’s no way anything can be that clear, that sharp. His hair has that mussed “fuck me” look that Dean sometimes cultivates, or used to, anyways, when he went out to drink, and he’s got this…this _jawline_. If Sam weren’t completely dedicated to Jessica, he thinks he might be tempted to go for it. Except he is. _Totally_ dedicated.

Also, the guy’s wearing a _really_ familiar trench coat. Sam squints at it, and then glances at the guy’s face.

“…I think I know you,” he says. The guy blinks at him.

“My name is Castiel. I apologize for the delay in my transfer.”

Sam stares.

“What?” Castiel. It sounds familiar. Where has he heard it before? Because he _knows_ this guy, he does, he’s…

“Ah. Gabriel informed me of the proper techniques with which to greet a new neighbor, but I…forget.” And then Castiel sticks out his hand, and something in Sam’s brain clicks.

“Gabriel,” he repeats. Then, “ _Dean’s_ Gabriel? The one who’s dating my brother? Our _neighbor_?”

“Your neighbor,” Castiel corrects. His hand remains, unwavering, a bare foot away. Sam cautiously reaches out and shakes it, once, and then lets go. This is one of the angels, he realizes. The _other_ angel.

Stars, he’s warm.

“Sam?” He closes his eyes, resisting the urge to whimper as Jessica presses up against his back, peering around his shoulder at their unexpected…guest? Neighbor? Possible stalker? “ _Oh_. Who’s this?”

“I am Sam’s new neighbor. In light of recent events, I have been assigned to him as a personal guardian until further notice or the event of his death.” Castiel pauses, and then says, “I will, however, endeavor to ensure that the latter does not come to pass.”

“He’s an angel,” Sam says faintly. “Remember when I told you that there were _two_ angels who moved across the street from us? Gabriel was one.”

“And Castiel is the other,” Jessica finishes, nodding as if this is perfectly normal, she totally expected this to happen, and Sam is a _god_ and he is totally in the dark. What does that even say about his life? “So, he’s…your guardian angel?”

“An unusual term,” Castiel comments, “but not inaccurate.”

Sam makes a noise that, _he_ thinks, perfectly conveys the exact mixture of frustration, incredulity, and wounded masculine pride that he is feeling at this precise moment. He doesn’t need a guardian angel. He _definitely_ doesn’t need a guardian angel with a stupid trench coat and blue eyes and fuck-me hair.

And then Jessica leans up, placing her chin on Sam’s shoulder, her lips directly against his ear. “He’s pretty cute,” she whispers, and Castiel tilts his head – Sam wonders if angels have normal hearing, or good hearing, or _godly_ -good hearing. He’s screwed regardless, though, because the next thing that Jessica says is, “Do you want to come in for a cup of coffee? Or maybe tea’s more your thing – I’ve never met an angel before, so forgive me if I…”

“There is nothing to forgive,” Castiel says, and then he steps past them both, brushing against Sam’s arm - _so warm_ \- and striding into the living room like he knows precisely where he wants to go…except he stops, there in the middle of the room, and then turns in a slow circle. Surveying the place? Checking for potential exit points? Or places where someone could hide a hex bag or a bomb? Sam can’t tell.

Jessica watches him twirl in a circle, too. Her eyebrows are raised in contemplation, and her lips are slightly pursed. Then she turns back to Sam. “This might sound like a weird question, but have you ever considered sleeping with another guy?”

Sam closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. He tucks his arm around Jessica’s waist; she’s small and warm and soft against his side. Sam’s thought about it, before. Back when he didn’t have Jessica. Back when Dean came home with someone different every night, and Sam sort of just wanted to have someone, just to say _look, this is what commitment looks like, you can do this, you can find someone to love like this_. But, of course, Penn’s Creek is a small town, and small towns tend to be…less diverse. Sam had spent most of his teenage years alone, save for one ill-fated tryst with a satyress in the tenth grade.

But he _has_ thought about it.

He lets the front door swing shut behind them; he doesn’t answer, but when Jessica leans up and kisses his neck, he can feel her smiling.

“You’re really something,” he murmurs, and Jessica turns her head, laughing against his shoulder.

“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” she says, and then she pulls away, and Sam watches her drift into the living room, where Castiel is still standing, watching them both, expression puzzled, but interested.

After a moment, Sam follows her.


End file.
